Has all the talk in the media about Windows 7 had you wondering what Windows 7 is and what happened to Windows Vista? Does the media buzz remind you that at one point ITS was talking about upgrading to Windows Vista from Windows XP across campus? Well, here is the latest information to satisfy those burning questions.

The campus Banner system will be offline and unavailable from 5:00 PM Friday, October 9, 2009, until 7:00 AM Monday, October 12, 2009. This is a planned downtime to move components of the Banner system to new server hardware and a new operating system environment. Both the Banner production database and the ODS database are being moved from a single older HP server running the HP-Unix operating system (Phoenix) to their own separate dedicated Intel-based Dell servers running the Linux operating system. This move will enhance both security and performance and over the long term significantly reduce costs of hardware acquisition and operating system licensing and maintenance. It also moves us onto a platform (Linux on Dell) that Sungard itself uses as one of the primary "reference" architectures in its own testing centers.

Banner users should not experience any change in the operation of the system following the downtime. If you have any questions or concerns related to this maintenance window, please contact Charles Murray in ITS.

Last month, Apple dropped their latest Mac OS upgrade. Mac OS X 10.6, or more colloquially, Snow Leopard, has already seen one major point update in that time, and ITS is busy getting the new system ready for testing on campus.