[Shefflea-broadband] Sims server specification : not strictly Broadband

[Chris Johnson]

Dear all
I'm assuming assuming Capita are expecting schools to run SIMS .net server on "professional hardware" servers not on low end servers or high end workstations.
We've just looked on Dell and a couple of other sites to price up one of these servers and the highest spec Xeon processor available appears to be 3GHz, somewhat short of the 3.2GHz they recommend as a minimum.*

Gripe!

I'm also assuming that most schools won't have more than 50-70 concurrent staff accessing sims which makes the spec of a dual 3.2GHz 4GB ram (our mdf is 2GB) a very capable database server.  As a comparison check out the professional webservers offered by most ISPs capable of supporting 100's of concurrent users, most serving database backed web applications and this sims platform starts to look very inefficient.

Another thing I'm not happy about is that Capita are now telling us what version of desktop applications we should use!  Rather than program their software properly to create open standard reports they are effectively removing the schools option to either stick with Office 2k or move to office 2k7 or Open office and tying us to 4 year old office applications.  Has this additional cost been factored in to the cost to the LEA/schools of running SIMS?  We are already tied to using MS servers for our databases and Microsoft databases on our servers.

End of Gripe!

We've been getting prices for our new sims server and off the web (which I admint isn't always best price) we are alooking at about £4k

This server may be of interest 

http://www.viglen.co.uk/viglen/Products_Services/HPC/HX2220i.aspx

1 box, 2 servers, 8x 2GHz Xeon cores and 4GB RAM each, £3500 
Doesn't meet min

* I have since found that HP do some Xeons up to 3.4 but these seem to be single core and the trend seems to be towards dual core these days.  It still seems overkill for a database server.

Chris Johnson
Technical Team Manager
King Edward VII School
Sheffield
e:cjohnson at kes.sheffield.sch.uk
t:01142296570