Comments on: It’s Not Glamo(u)rous. Just Essential.

By: Understanding Free « HOME STUDY

Understanding Free « HOME STUDY — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:34:43 +0000

[...] have been many discussions about the value of institutions providing their own spaces for students. Sometimes this isn’t an option and so part of my thinking is to provide [...]

By: Understanding Free | Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Understanding Free | Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:16:45 +0000

[...] have been many discussions about the value of institutions providing their own spaces for students. Sometimes this isn’t an option and so part of my thinking is to provide [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:29:33 +0000

What about using a standard inflation model. Start with a set amount of storage space in year one, and then increase by 3-5% per year. You can budget, and then as costs of storage continue to come down, the budget works in your favor as storage costs less each year. Bens last blog post..Saying Goodbye…

By: Matt Montagne

Matt Montagne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:56:58 +0000

Stay away from expensive LAN storage systems…you get very, very little bang for your buck with these proprietary SAN storage solutions and they’re extremely expensive to support and maintain.

Several years ago at my old school we ended up puchasing a Dell SAN for 120K…for this kind of cost one would think we could set quotas higher than 60 MB for students and 1 GB for teachers that we ended up with. Additional blade modules for storage were extremely expensive (we were stuck with a razor/razor blade proposition).

You’d be much, much better off harnessing the local storage capacity of your teacher computers and having them back up to external drives. You can pick up 1 TB drives for less than $100. For 20K you can pick up 200 TB of storage…you’ll never be able to acquire this much storage on the network side for a reasonable cost.

Combine this with a google apps network and other web applications and you’re good to go. Use all the money you’ll save by avoiding the expensive LAN storage solution and buy more bandwidth.

By: Matt Montagne

Matt Montagne — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:54:28 +0000

I would suggest a move away from expensive, proprietary network storage systems …they get old quickly and are expensive to administer and update. When it comes to adding fiber/SATA disks to expand storage, it can get extremely expensive very fast. At my previous school we spent 120 K on a Dell storage SAN thinking we got a great deal…but it was crazy expensive to add more storage (it was kind of a razor/razor blade thing). Also, even with a $120 K storage solution our students were still had 60 MB quotas and our teachers had 1 GB quotas.

You’re much, much better off utilizing the massive storage that comes on individual computers now…buy everyone in your district a terabyte external disk like this one for backups and save yourself the expense of crazy expensive network storage systems: http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-1tb-usb-2-0-external-hard-drive-cavalry-usb-2-0-external-hard/q/loc/101/206746682.html

Take all that money you’ll save by avoiding an expensive LAN network storage system and spend it on bandwidth.

~Matt

Matt Montagnes last blog post..Acer Aspire One in the House!

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:50:34 +0000

Hi Bud.

Recently one of our teachers filled up his 750 MB limit. I think it now has been increased to 1 GB (1000 MB) for him. That seemed like a temporary fix and reminded me of a program that one of my students wrote in Java. Since he wanted to use arrays, he allocated a certain size that the array could become. Then, when it ran out of room, he had the program automatically create a new array that was twice as large. When that one filled up–again, a new array twice as large as that one.

I think some kind of system where a set level for most users is sufficient, yet with some kind of exponential growth potential for those that legitimately need it–maybe something like that would be best.

Thousands of text files = one Windows Bitmap file.

By: Jackie Ballarini

Jackie Ballarini — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:13:57 +0000

Hmm, my current documents folder is 1.85GB. No movies. No music. No personal pictures. My current "math_teaching" folder alone has 667.1 MB. Then again, I'm kind of skeptical of the cloud and keep local copies of everything. I also host my school website (and associated uploads) offsite, so these figures don't include those files. Our school allows us 2.5 GB of server space per teacher. This doesn't include the shared server space. I have no idea how you'd figure this out for a whole school. I hope my data helps. I'd like to hear what you finally decide upon (and how). Jackie Ballarinis last blog post..Why not both?

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:13:46 +0000

640K should be enough for anyone…

You’ll likely have a massive variation in requirements from staff and students alike – so many factors come into play: Are they heavy users? Do they want to store revisions or just final versions? Are they working with video/graphics? etc…

One solution would be to plan for easy and fast expansion – you can promise a reasonable/high amount and bank on the majority of your users not using it to anything near capacity. Think Gmail/most webhosts. If you’re going to have a reasonably large user base then statistics will be your friend and help you predict future requirements.

Try this: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/