BenBailey.net

Don’t forget that System Administrator Appreciation Day (also known by the somewhat depressing acronym, SAAD) is Friday, July 27th. So don’t forget to say hello or provide free caffeine to those who help keep the computers running smoothly.

I don’t work with enterprise gear like what Sun produces, but I try to keep up since the data center can hint at the types of technology that will trickle down to smaller businesses and the consumer market.

Robert Scoble visited with Sun during their press conference announcing the new blade server 6200 series. You can check out of the video here.

Quick recap:

• Introduced Intel Xeon processors in the new blades
• The new blades seem aimed at offering a lot of the functionality of a normal 1-U rackmount server with the convenience and power saving options of blades.
• Universal platform supporting Intel, AMD and Sparc
• Uses non-proprietary IO (PCI Express) for convenience and lower costs.
• Sun’s efforts in green computing. Blades share power and cooling architecture to save power compared to rackmount servers. Certain functions, such as cryptography, are on the Niagra II chip which can save power.

You can learn more about the new blades server over at Sun’s website. Sun also has video of the launch event here.

I’ve never been a fan of the shutdown tracker in Server 2003. Though useful on production servers, it gets old fast when enabled on a test server in VMWare that you reboot/shutdown often. Luckily it is simple to disable.

To turn off the shutdown tracker on 2003 Server:

1. Start–>Run
2. Type: gpedit.msc
3. Under Administrative Templates -> System, set Display shutdown event tracker to Disabled.
4. Click OK and you’re done.