I have to agree with Bob that you were most likely undersized for your environment. For example, with all features enabled, a 220 is rated for 70-75 users max.
Now, as far as features and development goes, you don't specify the features that you were looking for, so I can't speak to specifics. Product management determines the features that will be added in a given major release. Then development goes to town on the coding. Those two groups along with sales, marketing, and management all chime in on a target release date. The final true release date may be pushed back for any of several reasons, chief among them being issues discovered during external beta or internal QA. I personally would rather see a release come out late than have something released with known major issues or announced new features stripped out.
Feel free to PM me the case number where you waited days for a response and I'd be happy to look into it for you.
__________________ ACE v8/SCA v9.3
...still have a v5 install disk in a box somewhere.
At the time these devices were locking up, our smallest elementary school (just a step up from a one-room schoolhouse) only had 20 devices accessing the network. It usually crashed during an Active Directory account import in the middle of the night when no one was in the building. Since I disabled Clam-AV, Snort, application tracking, changed the VPN connections to IPSec from SSL and a few other tweaks to get RAM usage down, things have run relatively smoothly.
I agree with you that I want releases to be as bug free as possible but I don't agree that deadlines should be casually issued and then ignored. It's very frustrating to hear from developers, sales, support, or other representative that something is coming out in July, then August, then September... The Astaro devices are not the only devices I manage and I try to plan time to handle any fallout from updating vital systems.
When I hear about deadlines for a major upgrade I'm not surprised when it's missed by a month. I still don't think it's right but I have lowered my expectations. So when I heard v9 would be available to us hardware folks in July, I figured by late August it would definitely be out. This was confirmed by your post earlier in the forum. So I was all ready for the last week of August to tackle what I expect will be a very difficult process (not just technically) no matter how hard developers work to make it easier.
Ideally, I would wait a long time before upgrading but there is a feature that I need to setup so that I can keep a deadline I communicated to my colleagues. I have communicated to other folks that YouTube for EDU would be available this school year.
I feel I have already failed, because my personal intent was to make it available at the beginning of the school year. My teachers asked for this because they had spoken with other teachers at other schools that had this implemented last year. Astaro's slowness to implement this feature is one example of many that has lead me to the conclusion that they do not support schools very well because Astaro is making it difficult for me to support my teachers.
In our schools, we only recently added the network capacity to handle video streaming. Previously, we were on T1 lines and video streaming simply wasn't allowed. The ASGs were critical in setting up the new VPN design with Fiber and Cable modems rather than a T1 hub-spoke design. I want to enable YouTube but I don't want our bandwidth used up by the latest cute animal clip, pop music video, and other non-academic stuff. That's why my teachers are looking forward to when this feature rolls out. If I can't get this done with Astaro I will find a way to get it done this school year. Even if I have to setup a Linux box and get Squid running.
Many competitors have HTTP header customization and/or URL rewrite capability already built in so customers could use this feature when it came out, other companies that didn't have it were able to provide a check-box or other implementation in a minor update several months ago. With Astaro I am still waiting.
At the time these devices were locking up, our smallest elementary school (just a step up from a one-room schoolhouse) only had 20 devices accessing the network. It usually crashed during an Active Directory account import in the middle of the night when no one was in the building. Since I disabled Clam-AV, Snort, application tracking, changed the VPN connections to IPSec from SSL and a few other tweaks to get RAM usage down, things have run relatively smoothly.
I agree with you that I want releases to be as bug free as possible but I don't agree that deadlines should be casually issued and then ignored. It's very frustrating to hear from developers, sales, support, or other representative that something is coming out in July, then August, then September... The Astaro devices are not the only devices I manage and I try to plan time to handle any fallout from updating vital systems.
When I hear about deadlines for a major upgrade I'm not surprised when it's missed by a month. I still don't think it's right but I have lowered my expectations. So when I heard v9 would be available to us hardware folks in July, I figured by late August it would definitely be out. This was confirmed by your post earlier in the forum. So I was all ready for the last week of August to tackle what I expect will be a very difficult process (not just technically) no matter how hard developers work to make it easier.
Ideally, I would wait a long time before upgrading but there is a feature that I need to setup so that I can keep a deadline I communicated to my colleagues. I have communicated to other folks that YouTube for EDU would be available this school year.
I feel I have already failed, because my personal intent was to make it available at the beginning of the school year. My teachers asked for this because they had spoken with other teachers at other schools that had this implemented last year. Astaro's slowness to implement this feature is one example of many that has lead me to the conclusion that they do not support schools very well because Astaro is making it difficult for me to support my teachers.
In our schools, we only recently added the network capacity to handle video streaming. Previously, we were on T1 lines and video streaming simply wasn't allowed. The ASGs were critical in setting up the new VPN design with Fiber and Cable modems rather than a T1 hub-spoke design. I want to enable YouTube but I don't want our bandwidth used up by the latest cute animal clip, pop music video, and other non-academic stuff. That's why my teachers are looking forward to when this feature rolls out. If I can't get this done with Astaro I will find a way to get it done this school year. Even if I have to setup a Linux box and get Squid running.
Many competitors have HTTP header customization and/or URL rewrite capability already built in so customers could use this feature when it came out, other companies that didn't have it were able to provide a check-box or other implementation in a minor update several months ago. With Astaro I am still waiting.
