Geeking At School

Our department watched a demo of the free version of a hosted website for the school district this morning. My boss has been rolling through the demos and calls in response to her RFP that she put out for webhosting….and this was just another step in the horrendous but necessary Erate process. For those of you not in education, don't ask. Erate is a pain to deal with, although it does allow schools to actually afford technology. But I digress. As we were watching the demo, a flash of "duh" hit me: what do we even want to accomplish with our website? Everyone knows that if an organization does not have a compelling website, it, in essence, fails to exist. The world does not revolve around yellow phonebooks anymore. But why do we need one with a bunch of bells and whistles? And who is it for? It seemed that we were focusing a lot on comparing shiny things from one CMS company with the perhaps more-shiny tools and widgets from another CMS company..... As I sat there and thou...

[caption id="attachment_27" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Some of our servers in our server room..."] [/caption] This is both frightening and exciting at the same time. The beginning of the story is: Dell (as a company) decided that they were sorry for the poor customer service they had provided in our area, so they had a little bit of 'seed' money with which they gave us a free server, built specifically for virtualization. My boss worked her magic as well and was able to pick up another one just like it (Dell PowerEdge R710), a SAN (EqualLogic PS4000X), and a couple copies of VMware ESXi. We have not started the process of setting up the server yet, but it's definitely going to be quite the process but very exciting. An opportunity like this doesn't happen very often, especially in our school district. To give you a better idea of what I mean, right now we're running servers that are approximately 15 years old, run...