leo@hoss.unl.edu (Leo Chouinard) (10/14/90)
Late Friday afternoon (10/12), the chairman of my department came by and said that about 17 seconds earlier he had gotten an announcement from the dean's office that departments have until this Wednesday (10/17) to apply for some equipment money the dean has. After a discussion, the chair asked me to put together a proposal for equipment (hardware and software) to handle a system to monitor our placement procedures. That's a situation where probably for now 5 people in the department need ready access to a fairly sizable database. The following are the desired parameters for the proposed LAN/multiuser system: 1. The most cash we can ask for is apparently $20,000. Beyond that, we currently have two PS/2 50's that we can use with whatever we get. (The other three people will need totally new machines, I believe.) 2. If possible, we'd like to use the opportunity to get a small LAN that could grow with later infusions of cash to eventually include the entire faculty and staff of the department - that would mean potential for growth to at least 40 users. Currently, the five users who would be on the LAN are all on one floor, max distance between offices being less than 200 ft., I believe. The hypothetical eventual LAN would span two floors, with the max distance between offices then being less than 300 feet, in my belief. 3. We need to stick with platforms that can run some MS-DOS applications we already rely on. 4. We need to be able to keep track of at least 5000 students at a time. I'd be even more comfortable with capacity to handle 20,000 student records (that's our approximate undergraduate enrollment). If we get a LAN, I expect that we'll get a LAN version of either Paradox or Q&A, and that price has to be part of the $20,000 in that case. (Fortunately, with Borland's Paradox we can get huge educational discounts.) 5. One of the machines (at least) has to be able to function as a standalone for a month each summer, holding this data. (We station someone in a separate building to give waivers at that time.) Obviously, the standalone can't be the server, as the other users can't be down for a month. 6. Political considerations: since we aren't promised this money, but are competing with other departments for it, it probably is best to be aware that administrative types around here tend to shy away from no-name clones. I think I could make a case, say, for a Northgate Elegance system or a suitable Everex as a server, but putting in the lower-cost clones I might actually buy if it were my money probably would greatly decrease the chances of getting the proposal approved. If the only way to achieve the functionality needed at this price is to go with a multiuser system (with some kind of minilan to connect up the traveling machine when it's around), that is a possibility. I guess I'm aware that a dedicated server and three more user nodes add up to a good part of $20,000 already, and I've not been able to determine costs for things like NetWare over the weekend. (It seemed strange to me how the LAN magazines I looked at this weekend had so few adds that mentioned prices, compared to most computer magazines I've read.) In any case, I'd appreciate ANY recommendations. E-mail them to me to conserve bandwidth, if that's feasible for you. And if anyone else wants the information I get, let me know and I'll be happy to pass on a summary. Thanks in advance. Leo Chouinard leo@hoss.unl.edu (or leo@crchpux.unl.edu) Assoc. Prof. Dept. of Math & Stat Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln