Today, July 28, has been designated as the 7th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day and marks the launch of Sys Admin of the Year – a contest co-sponsored by Splunk, digg.com, Bawls (soda), LOPSA (League of Professional System Administrators, NaSPA (Network and Systems Professionals Association) and USENIX/SAGE (the Advanced Computing Systems Association).

Sysadmin of the Year is a 3-month program inviting business professionals to nominate their company’s system administrator to receive recognition and a prize for their outstanding achievements.

What achievements are those, you ask? Well, you're reading this, aren't you? That means s/he has managed to keep the systems you need to do your job running yet another day. In any data center, that's quite an achievement, given the complexity of the systems involved. If you aren't impressed by that, consider just how many routers, switches, and machines your request went through to get this page and then think about the number of sysadmins involved in making sure each of those touch-points is operational 24x7.

You can nominate your system administrator for their achievements here.