Talk:XS Server Hardware

Scalability

Doing some quick math based on Argentina Statistics, at the national level you have 5,151,856 kids in K-12 grades in 27,888 public shools, giving ~180 laptops / school (or ~3 servers / school).

Does the internet connection scale for larger schools ? Does a 60 student school have the same access as a 240 student school ?--Wad 00:22, 2 February 2007 (EST)

Good or bad? Don't know.

PRO

Multiple servers could improve coverage, redundancy and available storage.

CON

Higher costs per school (depending on alternatives), multiple failure points and/or administration.

We are deploying just one (overpowered) school server per early trial, and will obtain a better idea of the requirements. The final number may be 120, or 50...

As a note specific to Argentina, the educational system is split in 4 three-year chunks: EGB I, EGB II, EGB III + polimodal (being only EGBs compulsory). Multiple servers could support 'administrative' layers or frontiers between these different 'levels'—acting like some 'sub-network' division.

This is just a guess-list. Please add at will. PoV is subjective... so a con may sometimes be thought of as a pro depending on the overall context. For example, redundancy could be thought as good if it's simple and straight forward out-of-the-box(es), but if to administer the multiple servers you must do it in a totally different way than when you just needed one, then it can be thought as a con given the penalty to growth.

There is no question that a single school server will be targetting a maximum number of students, the only question is "how many?" I can design a server capable of serving 20 students, which will fail miserably if you try to use it stand-alone in a school of 200. I can design a server which can handle 800 students, but it would be overkill for a school of 30.--Wad 00:22, 2 February 2007 (EST)