200 computers would work fine from one server. There is no need of a server per year group....thats simply rediculous.
The fact is that initially all the computers will work off one server, since we don't have the cash to do any better, however I don't think it's as ridiculous as you suggest. It can distribute the load across network segments and, since the server won't (can't!) actually be any faster than my desktop machine, and I can easily saturate the hard disk IO on my own machine when working on various multimedia things, I'm sure that 200 kids doing not quite such adventurous stuff should be able to make a big dent in the performance of the machine.
Whatever the hardware it's not going to do more than 100M *bits* you could use multiple NICS, but this complicates the planning. Especially if your network is complicated.
And seeing as you seem to need NT/2000 servers for language lab et al then this/these may as well be for the whole school.
The point in the language lab is that the proprietary language software has to serve up multiple channels of streaming media to it's 30 machines. I think that would take a big chunk out of the available performance of that box, and leave the rest of the school poorly served when that machine was busy - if it was the only server.
It might be slightly easier with 29 machines, 1 network printer, 1 multi-midia server and 1 connection to the rest of the network. Which fits nicely onto a 32 port switch.
Since I originally posted the school has scrounged nearly 200 bare machines (200MHz PII) so the network load has just gone up, but I suspect the days of
Where were you able to scrounge these from? -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763