Your pager goes off and wakes you at 4:00 AM to let you know that the power is back on at the office, and you think, “Oh Great.” You look out the window and see the ground covered with snow as you fire up the home computer to see if you can send an e-mail - nothing. The drive to the office is quicker than usual, because there’s no traffic. It’s dark as you walk down the hall past the empty cubes, swipe your security card past the reader and open the big steel door. Ah, the familiar sound of cooling fans as you flip on the lights and walk to one of the many computer racks in the room. You jiggle the mouse in front of the console, and it lights up with a blue screen and a half booted system. The only option is to hit the power button.
That memory ran through my head during one of the recent ESG Lab projects I was involved in. I was thinking how rare it is for the computer equipment an administrator manages to be in the same office they work in these days - or even the same state, for that matter. We were testing a solution that paired NEC blade servers and storage with PAN Manager software from Egenera at the time.
