In addition, Intel released some new Xeon’s this week which will probably start showing up in our line-up of servers. The not-so-exciting one is the Xeon 6300 series, which is essentially a refresh of the E-2400 from 2023. In the past, this would have been our go-to for small business servers, but it is missing one crucial feature which is NVMe RAID. At Nordic, we’re done with SATA in all but the most specific cases, and without NVMe RAID, Intel’s low-end just isn’t exciting. We looked at the price difference and it just doesn’t really make sense to add in a controller card when the native VMD solution is so good. So, we’re sticking with the 6500 series until something changes. These are also a slight refresh over the 4510 chips we’ve been using, so I’m not rushing out to get a new one. At the high end, Intel has more cores in their top chip, but our clients rarely need more than what the previous generation could offer. I’d love to see an 8-core or 12-core chip that could hit 5 GHz, but that’s just not in the cards.

Finally, I’m tracking storage in the Micron 4600 and Samsung 9100 PCI-Express 5.0 drives. While these are not the drives we’re looking for necessarily, it’s a good sign that PCIe 5 is becoming more normal, since this is Samsung’s first drive with that interface and Micron’s first OEM drive. Both are nearly twice as fast as their previous generation, which means faster boot times, faster Windows Updates, and faster application launches. These are the things that business users feel, so we’re happy to see them showing up. We’ll need to move to Intel’s Ultra 200 series to get this performance unlocked, and the motherboards we need are still not launched yet for that change.

Getting away from hardware, Microsoft seems to have dumped a bug on us with Remote Desktop Connections last month. We noticed internally that our remote connections to our desktops were having trouble getting started. Specifically, you might get through all of the authentication parts only to be greeted by a black screen, or an image of the logon screen. Closing it out and re-opening it might work, or it might take a couple of tries. Logging into a fresh session (not a disconnected one) usually worked better, but I can’t say that’s always the case. There have been varying reports also as to whether you’re using the new Remote Desktop App from the Store or the tried-and-true Remote Desktop Client bundled into Windows. Our clients rely heavily on this feature in Windows, so we’re really hoping a new patch will be coming soon. There is a work around that we’ve found and are starting to test internally, but as with any work around, there may be some unintended consequences we don’t know about yet.

That’s about it for today, thanks for reading, and next time I promise it won’t be so hardware heavy.

-Nate