Hardware recommendations

[Steve Barr]

I am looking for recommendations for a BorderManager server. I
searched through the newsgroup, but couldn't find anything similar
size to what I am looking for.

We are a school district of 3600 students with approximately 1300 PC's
scattered throughout 8 buildings. Two of the buildings connect to our
high school building via district owned fiber. The remianing
buildings connect via T-1 circuits.

Our current connection to the Internet is a single T-1 circuit. In
the near future, we will be installing a new Cisco router and Cisco
8510 ATM switch. At the same time, we will be installing a second
T-1.

This past weekend, I replaced our failing BorderManager server with
what was supposed to be my ManageWise server. It is a Compaq DL380,
1ghz processor, 1gb RAM, and (2) 18gb 10K drives in RAID1
configuration. I installed NW5.1, BMEE3.5 with all current patches as
describe in Craig's guide. (Thanks Craig!)

I created a 5gb SYS volume and the remainder as CACHE. The CACHE
volume is has compression turned off, does not use suballocation, and
has an 8kb block size.

We are using static and dynamic NAT. Dynamic for workstations, and
static for printers (remote printers from AS/400 and VAX). There are
approximately 20 static NAT entries.

I appreciate any thoughts, comments or suggestions.

Thank you.

Steve Barr
Technology Coordinator
Madison Local School District