Apple grabs Tiger by the tail

It’s an old story – Apple enhances its server operating system with an eye toward winning over Corporate America. Of course Corporate America rarely responds to Apple but the company gets an “A” for trying.

This week a story in our Infrastructure section takes a look at Tiger, or Mac OS X Server Version 10.4.

Expected to be released in the first half of next year, Tiger brings more than 200 new features, including native support for 64-bit applications, Ethernet link aggregation that binds Ethernet connections to enable failover and faster network performance and access control lists that will enable users to go beyond traditional Unix permissions.

Tiger follows the October release of Mac OS X 10.3, codenamed “Panther,” which featured dozens of new capabilities and was aimed at making it easier to integrate Macs with existing Windows and Linux environments.

According to our author (jmears@nww.com) Apple has the same aspirations with Tiger, adding tools to simplify the migration of user and group account information from Windows Primary Domain Controller into Open Directory, for example. But it also includes a number of updates aimed at boosting performance and shoring up the operating system to support heavy-duty enterprise applications such as databases and high performance computing.

Meanwhile, analysts say that this latest release of Apple’s server operating environment provides some useful technical updates. They note that the Unix-based operating system is technically strong, comes with integrated open source applications that meet most business demands – such as the JBoss application server – and continues to ease deployment headaches with administrative tools. Xgrid, Apple’s clustering software, for example, will be integrated into the Tiger operating system.

For more on this see https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/071904apple.html