[Technical] How do you store your users data?

[Paul Williamson]

Hi,

I'm just wondering the sort of setup you use at your school to store all
of your students and staff files, how they access the storage and what
sort of backup/recovery you have in place.

I'll describe our fileserver setup:
Windows 2003 Server Standard
7 SATA Drives in RAID5 + 1 hotspare (gives about 450mB/s local speed on
the server) 
1GBIT Network connection to the core of the network
All files are copied over the network weekly to a backup server

I feel we are starting to outgrow our current set-up and would like to
hear how you store your users data. People are relying on computers more
than ever before so we need to get both redundancy and an increase in
speed happening.

We run a standard windows domain setup. All students use a mandatory
profile (1.5mb) hosted on this server, and then we have group policy
scripts which redirect their desktop and my documents folders to their
space on the fileserver. This means when someone saves a file on their
desktop, it is being saved directly to the server. With 100-150 users
logged on at once, the reads and writes per second are jumping between
10 and 130 and I suspect this could be slowing things down a bit.

Thanks,

Paul Williamson
Huntingtower School
Mt Waverley, Victoria