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Apple has not, and still does not, get the enterprise.

While Apple has been *extremely slowly* working to provide enterprise services (Apple's enterprise-specific phone support options are extremely improved, particularly the Preferred and Alliance levels), there are other areas that are still sorely lacking. Currently, we use AppleCare Enterprise Help Desk support, and have been fairly satisfied.

Apple does now offer 24x7 and 4 hour on-site service and support plans, and matches fairly well, most of the time, with our other vendors (primarily Dell, Sun, and IBM).

Where we get killed is on any kind of roadmap or planning information.

At Macworld San Francisco 2004, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which used to be the largest Mac site in the world, talked about what they learned integrating Macs in their enterprise. I've made the presentation available here. I recommend people take a look at it, as it covers other issues as well. Like many organizations, Apple suffered during the late 90s, when it wasn't clear what Apple's direction was, and when Apple's future seemed uncertain. This meant that LLNL went from having 14000 Macs in 1997 to having about half that in 2003. In the meantime, the Windows installed base increased commensurately. (I believe that since then, we've gone to being one of the largest Mac sites outside of Apple, with well over 10000 institutionally-owned Macs, and many Apple server and storage products both deployed centrally and around the campus. Some examples.)

What is one of LLNL's top recommendations for Apple?

Develop a working balance between Apple's needed "confidentiality" and Corporate IT's need of "roadmap" information

This balance, or lack thereof, is also listed as one of their top "difficulties" when working with Apple. And I couldn't agree more.

You touched on some other issues related to software development, integration of OSS components into the OS, acknowledgment of and tracking of bugs, bug fixes being pushed out to next major releases of the operating system (e.g., 10.3.x -> 10.4), and so on. One small victory has been that Apple does now provide semi-detailed information about security updates, and does provide security updates for the previous major version of the OS.

However, the list of deficiencies is much longer. At WWDC, pretty much the only information we get is with regard to software development (and to be fair, that's all the original article actually refers to). We get virtually no information on hardware futures. We don't need to see pictures or know exactly what speed something will be. We want to know where Apple's headed. What form will the Intel servers take? We don't want to find out the DAY they ship. Will they use multiple cores? How many? Which architectures? Will they finally have redundant power supplies? How many drive bays will they have? How many expansion slots, and what kind of expansion? Will the Xserve RAID transition to SATA? Will Apple provide onboard video on the Xserve? Will there be an expansion beyond light-duty servers? How will they integrate into our existing management infrastructure? Will Mac OS X Server make provisions for virtualization of multiple instances of Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? Where is Apple going with Darwin? What is the EOL schedule for Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? (Apple still makes NO INFORMATION available about official end-of-life or end-of-support for any versions of Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server. We just have to guess that the previous major version of Mac OS X is what's supported.) How long will PowerPC be supported? This list goes on and on and on and on.

Yes, you can glean and infer some of this stuff unofficially from things happening in th

I can also recommend the Xserve RAIDs from Apple.

Mostly for the RAID Manager app, which, if you open it up and pull out the .jar file, can be run on any system with a java VM. I had Xserve RAIDs attached to Xserves, Sun servers, Linux servers, and a Windows server.

See: http://www.alienraid.org/

200TB of Xserve RAID storage (link includes pictures)

Text of the article:

The University of Wisconsin - Madison has deployed 35 5.6TB Xserve RAID storage arrays in a single research installation as part of an ongoing scientific computing initiative.

The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW), a partnership between several research departments at the University of Wisconsin, have installed almost 200TB, or 200,000GB, of Xserve RAID arrays.

As a comparison, 200TB of storage is enough to hold 2.75 years of high definition video, 25,000 full length DVD movies, 323,000 CDs, 20 printed collections of the Library of Congress, or over 1000 Wikipedias.

The GLOW storage installation is physically split between the departments of Computer Sciences and High Energy Physics. Each Xserve RAID is attached to a dedicated Linux node running Fedora Core via an Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X Card and is either directly accessed via various mechanisms, such as over the network via gigabit ethernet, or aggregated using tools such as dCache.

The storage is primarily used to act as a holding area for large amounts of data from experiments such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Speaking as the owner of two XServe RAID devices (5TB and 7TB models) as well as several other Fibre Channel devices I can say that the Apple Fibre Channel is by no means slow. Each SATA drive has pretty much equal performance to the SCSI drives we use in our Dell head node. Combined together there are times where we can pull several hundred megs a second off the XRAID's. Plus our XRAID has been fairly immune to failures thusfar. I have yanked drives out of it and it just keeps right on going.

Another little hint, if you are really worried about speed you can just install large high RPM sata drives yourself. Its not that hard to do at all.

Check out Alien Raid for more information.

Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware.

Well, we purchased 35 Xserve RAID arrays for a single installation, for a total of 200TB of storage, after real research and comparisons as opposed to a gut feeling.

The installation is described here, with pictures. It is NOT a University-wide service; this was installed for one research project. We have much more storage around campus from EMC (in our two primary datacenters), Apple, Sun, and Storagetek, among others.

It has been up and running for almost a year now, and the only problem, across all 35 Xserve RAID units running 24x7, has been one failed disk. One alternative looked at was building whitebox PCs in huge tower cases and packing them with disk. Ultimately, it was decided that a major commercial vendor, from which 24x7 support and 4-hour on-site response is available for 3 years, was a good choice. And it was much cheaper than competitive commercial solutions. And at a cost of around $1.60/GB for enterprise storage, you can't really go wrong. And for the Mac OS X-haters out there, there is no Mac OS X as part of this solution. We are using commodity 1U servers running Fedora Core. The Linux boxes see it as generic fibre channel disk, because that's all it is. The servers are monitored with Apple's excellent Java-based, platform independent RAID Admin tools, and some command-line tools we wrote ourselves.

It's proven itself to be rock-solid. And that matches with my experience with the 20 Xserve servers we have installed, starting since around mid-2002: zero hardware failures, of any kind. Franzen had a good gut feeling. And, of course, given Apple's track record with reliability and lack of need for repairs (generally number one) when compared with other vendors from organizations such as Consumer Reports, guessing that the reliability of another Apple product will be good is probably a reasonable guess. ;-)

Must be nice to have money to burn, but "gut feeling" is a very, very poor way to select hardware.

Well, we purchased 35 Xserve RAID arrays for a single installation, for a total of 200TB of storage, after real research and comparisons as opposed to a gut feeling.

The installation is described here, with pictures. It is NOT a University-wide service; this was installed for one research project. We have much more storage around campus from EMC (in our two primary datacenters), Apple, Sun, and Storagetek, among others.

It has been up and running for almost a year now, and the only problem, across all 35 Xserve RAID units running 24x7, has been one failed disk. One alternative looked at was building whitebox PCs in huge tower cases and packing them with disk. Ultimately, it was decided that a major commercial vendor, from which 24x7 support and 4-hour on-site response is available for 3 years, was a good choice. And it was much cheaper than competitive commercial solutions. And at a cost of around $1.60/GB for enterprise storage, you can't really go wrong. And for the Mac OS X-haters out there, there is no Mac OS X as part of this solution. We are using commodity 1U servers running Fedora Core. The Linux boxes see it as generic fibre channel disk, because that's all it is. The servers are monitored with Apple's excellent Java-based, platform independent RAID Admin tools, and some command-line tools we wrote ourselves.

It's proven itself to be rock-solid. And that matches with my experience with the 20 Xserve servers we have installed, starting since around mid-2002: zero hardware failures, of any kind. Franzen had a good gut feeling. And, of course, given Apple's track record with reliability and lack of need for repairs (generally number one) when compared with other vendors from organizations such as Consumer Reports, guessing that the reliability of another Apple product will be good is probably a reasonable guess. ;-)

Why is 15TB of storage news? (And they don't even the full 15TB yet!)

What about the 200TB of Xserve RAID storage for a single project at the University of Wisconsin, which has been up and running for over half a year?

And no, this isn't a project serving a whole campus or an entire university student body. This is one single research project operated by one entity. Oh well, I guess supporting the Large Hadron Collider isn't as cool as South Park. ;-)

Oracle endorses, uses Xserve RAID:
http://alienraid.org/article.php?story=oracle

http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
http://www.apple.com/xsan/

The University of Wisconsin has deployed 200 TB of storage for support of similar types of experiments as part of the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin.

Brief article, with pictures:

University of Wisconsin deploys nearly 200TB of Xserve RAID storage (Google cache)

The storage is used for, among other things, particle physics simulations in support of research projects at sites such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. More information on GLOW and its initiatives can be found here.

Text of the above article:

The University of Wisconsin - Madison has deployed 35 5.6TB Xserve RAID storage arrays in a single research installation as part of an ongoing scientific computing initiative.

The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW), a partnership between several research departments at the University of Wisconsin, have installed almost 200TB, or 200,000GB, of Xserve RAID arrays. As a comparison, 200TB of storage is enough to hold 2.75 years of high definition video, 25,000 full length DVD movies, 323,000 CDs, 20 printed collections of the Library of Congress, or over 1000 Wikipedias.

The GLOW storage installation is physically split between the departments of Computer Sciences and High Energy Physics. Each Xserve RAID is attached to a dedicated Linux node running Fedora Core 3 via an Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X Card and is either directly accessed via various mechanisms, such as over the network via gigabit ethernet, or aggregated using tools such as dCache.

The storage is primarily used to act as a holding area for large amounts of data from experiments such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Aside from the GLOW initiative, the university also has Xserve RAID storage systems in use in other areas as well.

Full disclosure: I am the administrator of alienraid.org and am affiliated with the University of Wisconsin.

'Uhh' yes they do. They can take 2Gb DIMMS to a total of 16Gb. The graphic if you care to check the link is hosted on Apple's site.

As I said, Apple don't like to admit it and the official line is they are 'not supported' but then XServe RAID was initially 'not supported' on Windows or Linux either until people started plugging them in and finding that they worked. Now suddenly they are certified for Windows and Linux (and in fact I have two, one of which is connected to a Windows server and works just fine).

There's a new community site called alienRAID.org that focuses on supporting Xserve RAID in non-Apple and mixed environments. It's likely to be helpful to people interested in deploying Xserve RAID in conjunction with other platforms.