Apple and the enterprise

Macintosh systems administrator for Gear for Sports in Lenexa, Kan.

Is Apple ready for the Enterprise? Yes!. They have been for years. I'm living the dream now.

I have 200 Macs and 500 PCs. My Macs are all running Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger. They are seamlessly integrated in an Active Directory/Exchange environment. Microsoft's DHCP, DNS, etc., all work perfectly fine with my Macs. In fact, my Microsoft Exchange engineer uses OS X for all kinds of Active Directory-related diagnostics. My Cisco engineer now runs both Mac OS X and Windows on a Apple computer. One of our Oracle database administrators has recently moved to Mac OS X as well. Life is good.

We just had a major virus outbreak 3 weeks ago. All 500 Windows PCs were out of commission for 24 to 36 hours. It cost the company over $100,000 dollars in revenue. All 200 of my Macs kept on running just fine the entire time.

I administer ten Xserves and three Xserve RAIDs. I'm providing AFP [AppleTalk Filing Protocol], SMB/CIFS, FTP, SSH services as well as other services such as NetBoot/NetRestore, Software Update and even specialized Font Server solutions for my Mac desktops (FontAgent Pro controls the usage and management of thousands of fonts on all my Mac desktops).

Some of my Xserves are also sharing iSCSI Lefthand Networks storage area network storage with my IBM and Dell Windows servers. My SAMBA server is beautiful. I have well over 100 Windows clients connected daily that have no idea that they are mounting CIFS/SMB volumes from a server running Mac OS X. It just works.

My Apple servers have maintained 99.97% uptime for the last 3 years straight. I have several servers that haven't been rebooted or otherwise touched in 7-plus months of solid uptime. They don't go down unless I tell them to go down. Period.

We have endpoint control measures enabled on our Aventail VPN solution that work perfectly on both Windows and Macs. My Cisco VPN client runs great on OS X too.

I control several Windows desktops and servers from my Mac running Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client.

Managing, deploying and administering Mac OS X desktops is amazing. By leveraging Apple's ARD 3.1 product I am able to send out Unix scripts and commands, install packages and totally control all my Macs. I just installed a major Microsoft Office update to 160 Macs in less than 20 minutes.

Most of my desktop Macs are running Microsoft Office 2004, Entourage 2004 and NeoOffice 2.1. Windows-only apps are published out to my desktop Macs using Citrix.

My Desktop Macs are not only connecting to and mounting the usual AFP volumes from my OS X Servers, but they regularly mount SMB share points from my Windows servers, too. I even have a fairly large contingent of Macs that regularly connect to a few Red Hat Linux Samba servers too. I also have an OS X Server that shares NFS [Network File System] volumes with an AIX 5 Oracle server.

By leveraging the power of OS X's BSD underpinnings I am able to rely on proven tools such as SSH, FTP, VNC, syslog, ntp, etc to keep my Macs up and running with practically zero downtime.

IT manager for New Frontier Media in Boulder, Colo.

I am in the middle of a huge transformation from PC to Mac in our enterprise.

For several years we were a PC-only company but with the advancements in Final Cut Pro, we switched to Mac for our editors about three years ago.

As of right now, I have converted three departments to Mac and am working on a forth. There are currently about 30 Mac stations on my network with about 15 more to add by end of year.

Last year we purchased an Xserve RAID box - about 40TB. And, then a second one of 5TB capacity. The arrays are Apple Xserve RAIDs with XServe metadata controllers and open directory servers.

We have had several challenges over the last year in regards to the Xserve RAIDs including dropped frames, integration with Microsoft Active Directory, fiber connectivity, and Enterprise support

Manager of software development for ADFITECH in Edmond, Okla.

Our company has successfully deployed an Xsan installation as the core storage platform for our mortgage-centric document imaging system.

Our XSan currently consists of three XServe servers and two XServe RAID storage units, all connected via fiber through an Emulex Fibre Channel switch. We also have a second mirror installation at a remote site for disaster recovery purposes which is kept in sync with our production system on a near real-time basis.

Web-based document retrieval applications are used on a daily basis for real-time access to the documents our clients use to process their mortgage loans as well as to support our in-house operations performing quality control audits on mortgage loans from over 300 clients around the nation.

Currently, we have about half of a terabyte of data stored, totaling around 20 million individual images. We've had our applications in production for about two years now and the Apple hardware and software has performed flawlessly. We've only lost one hard drive and that was in the very beginning so we just chalked that up to infant mortality of new hardware.

We chose the Apple platform for a couple of reasons. Obviously price was big consideration. At the time we purchased everything, we spent around $50,000 for all the hardware and software and that set us up with 4TB of scalable storage in a SAN environment with redundant metadata controllers. Price out that amount of storage in a scalable SAN platform from any of the most popular vendors and there's no contest on price, at least there wasn't two years ago. Secondly, we've always been a do it our own way type of shop. We're mixed Linux and Mac shop, only using Microsoft products when absolutely necessary. Up to this point we'd only had experience with the Mac desktop products but felt very confident in Apple's ability to produce solid, reliable, high-performance equipment and software so we were actually kind of excited to get our hands on their server hardware. If I had to make the decision over again, knowing what I know now, I'd make the same decision, it's been great.

We're about to add another Xserve RAID to the mix to more than double our storage capacity in light of some upcoming projects that will require us to significantly increase the number of documents we have stored past what our original projections were. According to Apple, this should be a simple process, I expect it to go well -- we'll find out shortly.

Network manager for WhippleHill Communications in Bedford, N.H.

We are a small company with fewer than 75 employees and we purchased an Xserve RAID about three and half years ago, initially only for file storage.

Our data needs were growing so fast and the Xserve RAID was one of, if not the most cost-effective and scalable storage device we could find. We connected it to a Windows 2000 server and have had great success. We also added drives to the other side of the array and are currently using that side to run all our development databases (a Windows 2003 64-bit box with SQL Server 2005 64-bit). That deployment has also been very successful for us. Based on our success with the current hardware, we will most likely be adding an additional XRAID and a new Xserve within the next 6-12 months.

Senior analyst for the Burton Group.

Any roles that Apple's XServe servers could play would have to displace LINUX or Windows server, says Nik Simpson, senior analyst for the Burton Group. The Apple platform simply doesn't have the scalability to run any of the large Unix applicationss that get hosted on Solaris and the like. YES!, you could replace many SQL server instances with Apple and MySQL, but Linux and MySQL would be a better choice simply because many adminstrators are already familiar with LINUX.

Microsoft applications are very ‘sticky' - nobody is going to replace Exchange because there is nothing comparable on the Apple platform, so going after the Microsoft installations is going to be a tough fight, says Simpson.

Many of the applications that could be replaced are running inside virtual machines on top of something like VMWare ESX - you can't run the Mac OS X as a virtual machine because Apple won't license that way, says Simpson.

Many things that you take for granted in terms of software support for bits of the enterprise infrastructure don't exist - try getting EMC PowerPath for Mac OS X.

At the end of the day, Apple doesn't really have much to offer as a server platform in the enterprise.