I have reached an impass.
A couple things you should know to understand my predicament…
I am the Technology Director or Network Administrator or whatever at Lansing Christian School. It’s a K-12 school with a little under 700 students.
Current distribution of computers:
119 Windows 98 PCs
10 Windows 2000 PCs
20+ Windows XP PCs
4 Windows 2000 Servers
I aim to knock out everything older than XP.
There is enough money to make some small positive changes and to keep things running relatively smoothly.
For $60,000 we could replace our 75 lab computers with 85 “thinclients” and 4 brand new servers. This is planned for three or four stages, about $20,000 for each lab.
What this all boils down to…
Replacing our existing labs with thinclient labs means only having to upgrade our servers in the future, not the computer terminals themselves. This means annual cost of total lab upkeep after the transition cost could be as low as $5,000.
It’s not my job to find donors for technology at LCS, but right now the focus here is on debt retirement and I’m really beating my head on the wall trying to figure out how to meet our technology needs.
We need to find someone, a group of people or a company that is able to help us meet our goals as fast as possible.
Why knock out everything older than XP?
Are you going to use Win2003 for the new servers?
pros/cons of thinclients…
Comment by The Dude — October 10, 2005 @ 2:20 am
Trying to set some standards to make mangement easier.
Upgrade to Windows Server 2003 is imminent.
Setting up thinclients means less changes on individual computers with easier manangement of security domain-wide. Software installation is also easier, since one install allows the necessary access. File management in a thinclient environment is also easier for the end-user. Thinclients are motor free as well, no hard drive, no cpu fan, nothin, so you end up with a much more reliable system. You can also have server redundancy so server outages don’t create access issues either.
Comment by nate — October 10, 2005 @ 2:50 pm
Very nice. It reminds me of the projects we did in Networking and DB classes. Except that we were paying to get educated, not being paid. And we weren’t using real money. And it wasn’t a real project. Nice research.
Comment by The Dude — October 17, 2005 @ 4:52 am