{"id":299,"date":"2014-04-26T11:26:44","date_gmt":"2014-04-26T11:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/?p=299"},"modified":"2014-04-26T11:26:44","modified_gmt":"2014-04-26T11:26:44","slug":"need-a-new-school-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/2014\/04\/26\/need-a-new-school-lab\/","title":{"rendered":"Need a new school lab?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t&lt;![CDATA[Frequently technology coordinators are faced with the option of adding or upgrading a new lab at school.\u00a0 Usually we just look at our current setup and upgrade to newer hardware, OSs, and associated software.\u00a0 This past year I was faced with the possibility of adding an additional lab in a very old (low tech) building.\u00a0 When our building supervisor looked at it he immediately said we would need a new sub-panel and wiring to support 28 new PCs in the room.\u00a0 His estimate for that was $7500.<br \/>\nInstead of going for the wiring and the traditional approach, I decided to look into greener options.\u00a0 The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncomputing.com\/products\/lseries\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nComputing L300 option<\/a> immediately popped out in my Google searches for low power PCs.\u00a0 I am not a fanboy of thin computing and was very skeptical about the statements concerning it&#8217;s performance.\u00a0 I contacted several other Technology Coordinators and got their feedback and recommendations.\u00a0 All of them gave the system high praise, once they got their labs configured correctly.<br \/>\nThe problem with this approach, and probably any thin computing lab, is proper configuration.\u00a0 Two schools both recommended a fully configured option from<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fireflycomputers.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> FireFly Computers.\u00a0<\/a> Their entire business is built on one thing, building nComputing Labs really well, and it turns out that they do just that.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2014\/04\/IMG_0040.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-304 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2014\/04\/IMG_0040-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_0040\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>We purchased their Firefly 1200 rackmount server and put it in our server closet.\u00a0 We did a 28 station lab in the existing classroom (with no additional electrical added.)\u00a0 The Ethernet (it is an all Ethernet connection back to the server) all goes through Gb switches to a single Gb copper line to the server.\u00a0 The setup could not have been more simple and the performance has been exactly as advertised.<br \/>\nI would recommend this path for any new lab.\u00a0 The price per workstation is much lower than ANY PC and the energy savings are great.]]&gt;\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&lt;![CDATA[Frequently technology coordinators are faced with the option of adding or upgrading a new lab at school.\u00a0 Usually we just look at our current setup and upgrade to newer hardware, OSs, and associated software.\u00a0 This past year I was faced with the possibility of adding an additional lab in a very old (low tech) building.\u00a0 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/2014\/04\/26\/need-a-new-school-lab\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Need a new school lab?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtechteach","category-tech-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.nationaltrail.k12.oh.us\/ittech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}