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Apple's Macworld Looking To Corporate Users
coondoggie writes to mention a Network World article about a focus on corporate users at the upcoming MacWorld Expo. Along with the consumer announcements (iTV, iPod stuff), there will be several elements dedicated to introducing IT pros to Apple hardware. From the article: "The show has really evolved. For a long time it was a consumer-oriented show and those of us who are from the enterprise space - there weren't very many of us - would use it as a place to meet and compare notes ... Now Macintosh in the enterprise is becoming more recognized and there are tracks that are specifically for us enterprise people. We don't have to sneak off anymore."
...welcome our new Corporate Apple overlords.
I think it's merely speculation at this point though, unless they introduce something for the corporate world that will really make people stand up. They have already started by essentially making all their machines Windows compatible, while still maintaining the OS X train.
I think they'd need to introduce something huge to really shake the corporate spenders into moving away from Dell+Windows+Office in the cheapest possible configuration. Who knows? I seriously doubt it will be an Office suite, put it that way. heh.
to start using Macs and then my company will port our software to Mac. Or is it the other way around, where we port and then our customers can switch to Macs?
Start Running Better Polls
I'm guessing they were referring to the OTHER side of the corporate network (authentication, web serving, database, e-mail, etc) instead of the client boxes. Of course this ignores the argument that Macs are cheaper because of the lack of spyware/viruses/etc which you may or may not buy.
There is no dispute that most custom business apps are written to Windows, although Parallels can fix that (though not cheaply at $80 for Parallels and $75 for an OEM windows).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Unless those apples cost less to keep up / maintain / their software is cheaper / they use less power.
By far the largest cost in IT is man hours. If you drop those by a little, you can save more than an apple will cost you.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Oh crap, the flood gates are going to open...head for higher ground!
Synchronize your calendar and mobile phone via text messaging.
Look at all the DRMs it is pushing in iPod. Look at how they stymie interoperability. Look how cavalierly they ignore all my settings and repeatedly install iPodhelper and other junk in the start up tray. Look how aggressively they try to associate Apple executables with every damn file type there is. Make no mistake, Apple is just a Microsoft wannabe that failed miserably to be Microsoft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's funny to see geeks in certain countries (I suppose it's the US) dreaming about the day the Mac will be used widely. IT WON'T HAPPEN. Apple itself doesn't want to! If they really wanted compete with Windows the software would be installable in any PC, otherwise they are just a company that produces expensive hardware for "special people".
There's no way they can match the price of a standard PC + Windows, so why bother?
The world is bigger than the US, the day Apple realizes that there might be a (very) small hope.
Macs also last longer and require less day-to-day maintenance which negates the increased upfront costs.
My last job, I admin'd a network and supported over 100 users at an all-Mac shop, by myself. This was in the late 90s, so it was pre-OS X. Most of my day was spent reading and surfing the web in my office. I dealt with the occasional hardware failure. Once in a while a Mac would get cranky and I'd have to go run Norton Utilities on it to fix it up, which it very seldom failed to do. Most of my support calls were to help people deal with Office documents sent from Windows-based clients/vendors/etc, because this was before the antitrust stuff really kicked into gear and Microsoft was merrily using their ever-changing Office file formats to force upgrades and keep competitors at bay.
Eventually the company decided to migrate to Windows "to be compatible with the rest of the world." Fantastic choice. The IT staff quickly tripled, and we really needed a fourth because of all the shit that went wrong with Windows and the crappy Dells the company settled on. I very quickly got tired of it and left.
Apple has made great strides since then with OS X, and would already be a force to be reckoned with in the enterprise if it weren't for empire-building PHBs who must preserve their big budgets and staff of minions to tend to temperamental Windows boxes.
The vast majority of "business apps", especially custom stuff, don't run on MacOS.
Macs don't have anything to really compare with Active Directory, and especially GPOs.
So...why would a business run on Macs? Unless they are a pre-press or video-production house, of course.
You gotta love the nay sayers that speak authoritatevly about something they have done zero research on. The more expensive macs are more expensive. You can buy a Mac Mini for $599 and it is a much better quality machine than the equivalent pricepoint pc. There is a Mac version or equivalent of the most important "business apps" and most of the "custom stuff" get's rewriten quite often and normaly relies on core technologies (SQL, PHP etc..) that thrive on the Mac platform. Mac's do have something to compare and completely integrate with Active Directory it is called Open Directory Research = good. Hiperbole = weak.
"This message was sent from an Apple
Apple has never got it. Ever. It means Corporate or Enterprise IT. If you look at their history in dealing with Big companies, you see recurring mistakes over the past 15 years. Some examples... In the early '90s, Apple was IN BASF. One of the things BASF liked was Apple seemed to be actively supporting the platform. They chose to over look the lack of engineering tools for the great support Apple was giving them. Then Apple Europe restructed and all the close working relationship was dropped. By '95, Apple was pretty much out of every european production/manufacturing company.
I was working as an Apple developer for 10 years in engineering. Every WWDC I would argue (with the sci-eng evangelist; a position they found hard to staff) that incentives to VARs would not break into corporate IT. Productivity alone doesn't cut it. The world needs Apps, and Apple needed to bend over backward to support developers brave enough to try for that 1%. Suffices to say... the strategy has not changed. Incentives to VARs and pushing the illusory ease and security envelope.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Maybe you can check facts first.
Check Leopard MacOSX Server:
Apache, Samba, OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Postfix, Cyrus, SpamAssasin, Jabber, CUPS, POSIX, Wiki, Xgrid, QT Streaming... all 64-bit, not mentioning DTrace and ZFS
Dude! That makes is coolest server on the block!!
MacOSX 10.5 Leopard Server
Apple, its what Windows runs best on.
One thing Apple could do is sell business Mac's running Windows (either through Bootcamp or just Windows). Why? Because they have such a tight grip on what does and does not work on their machines they can eliminate many of the issues that plague windows PCs.
or they could just try to get into the backend servers... but thats even more locked up than the PCs themselves at most places
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I was thinking about this exact thing the other day. The office I work in has about 300 people in it and 6 (that I know of) IT staff that do nothing but fix our computers. If you assume that each one costs the company $150K/year you could pay for a new macbook every year (just throw the old one out) for every employee if you could get rid of just 2 of them. I don't know if Macs would make that possible though.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It doesn't matter at all because the vast majority of business applications are not available for the mac. Period. If macs fill your needs, well, that's great; if not then you either have to choose windows or have a mix of machines which complicates your environment and raises the cost of support because you either need people who know both platforms and are thus ostensibly worth more money (especially if there actually were any real demand for people with mac skills, which we all know there is not) or you more people.
The single biggest cost in the typical windows shops I've seen has been dealing with viruses and malware. But if you lock the systems down a bit, then you can protect them from most of that. Meanwhile the mac simply doesn't serve all your business needs, so you will need something else, and homogeneity makes life MUCH simpler in IT.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The thing is, unless Apple can seamlessly integrate their desktop OS into Active Directory like how 2000/XP (and soon Vista) already do, they're not going to be considered as a major player in corporate IT land. They need to be able to plug into currently existing infrastructure, be centrally managed, and offer an improved Net Present Value over PC's.
I just don't see that happening for a number of reasons, asides from having to wait for Samba-4. It's going to be really tough to convince a CFO to buy new $2,000 MacBook Pro's for its users, plus copies of Parallels/VMWare Fusion, plus a Windows OS (not sure if MVL applies to Apple-based hardware - anyone?), and any other number of pieces of software that they need.
With bulk-licensing programs, it's much cheaper to replace old PC hardware with new while not having to worry a whole lot about licensing (so long as you did your homework when you spent the money). That's because you're moving from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, per say. There are very few vendors that'll let you move a license across different OS's.
Also, you have to re-train end users on how to use a different OS with its own quirks, provide HelpDesk support for dual-OS's (unless you ditch windows entirely; good luck with that), and you can't centrally manage them like you can with 2000/XP boxes in a properly implemented Active Directory environment.
Exchange support in Entourage is crap too since it relies on WebDev (IMAP/POP are your other options, which aren't good corporate solutions). Mac Excel != PC Excel. You get the point.
I do see Apple making inroads in the SoHo (Small Office, Home Office) area. Here you don't need a Domain infrastructure, workers are their own help desk, and so long as your work doesn't rely on some PC-only software, you can get by. The problem here is these customers are very price sensitive, so a Dell $500 special is much more appealing than what Apple offers.
On the IT side of things, I use a MacBook Pro with OS X, XP, and Gentoo Linux loaded on it, running in Parallels. It's my main box, and I love it for a few reasons:
1) 3 OS's on one machine instead of 3 OS's on three machines. Wonderful!
2) I personally like OS X as my main desktop environment over XP and Gnome.
3) I need access to all 3 OS's to do my work, which is pretty rare.
On the downside:
1) No docking station support.
2) No Serial/Parallel/Modem cables - all needed by IT Pro's to hook into existing networking gear, and to provide legacy support.
3) The battery sucks relative to previous PC laptops I've had (2-3 hours use vs. 5-6 on a PC laptop).
4) No floppy drive.
Ready for Corporate IT land? It still has a long ways to go. For a power user like myself? Yeah, it fits nicely.
OEM Windows? That's a violation of the licensing agreement, and if you are lucky enough to receive a Microsoft audit, you will be presented with a bill for ((number of macs running OEM windows on parallels) * (current cost of a windows license of their choice)).
I like how your solution to running windows apps on the mac will get your ass sued in a corporate environment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
*** Now Macintosh in the enterprise is becoming more recognized and there are tracks that are specifically for us enterprise people ***
He made a funny. Mac in widespread enterprises will happen when hell freezes over (i.e. Linux becomes widespread in home use)
Eh? How does this work? The advertising strategy seems somewhat flawed.
From the Apple adverts I'm under the impression Macs can only blog and print photos. Maybe make a home movie or two... Other than resulting in all system administrators suddenly becoming good looking, young, thin and trendy, I don't see what real use Apple systems have in a corporate setting.
Check out this company's wrongdoing and malfeasance at:
http://malfy.org/
"For a long time it was a consumer-oriented show [...]"
Unless they're now catering to people who don't "consume" their computers, it's still a consumer-oriented show, only now they are including corporate (would-be) consumers. Hmmm, corporate consumers... a literal one of those would be nice to have around.
Eh. Macs would be somewhat workable if you had a SMALL network, I guess. But on a large network, you WANT the control that Active Directory and GPOs give you.
Hers's how it works. You buy a zillion Windows machines. You create a "standard" image of Windows for these machines, and keep the image on the network, and use Ghost (or equivalent) to push images onto the client PCs. This image has everything locked down. Users can't tweak or install anything. Their "My Documents" folder is redirected to a share on the server, which gets backed up. If you need to install software on a machine, you do it with SMS, and don't even have to touch the client machines. If you want to REALLY get crazy, you give everyone a roaming profile, so any machine they login to has all their stuff. For anti-virus, you buy a Fortigate unit to block viruses and spyware at the "gateway" level.
The end. Any problems, you just re-image the machine.
Yes, it's a lot of work. But it's a one-time thing. And big networks NEED this kind of functionality. Not to mention they probably need Exchange/Outlook, too. I personally think Exchange sucks balls, but it does do a lot of neat stuff, and lots of companies use it.
As for "internet servers"...you should use Linux in almost all cases.
Totally agree here. OSX, FreeBSD, linux, and OpenVMS are for "n00bs".
Everyone know that the real "l33t h4ck3r admiz" chose Windows.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/
$499 for 10 users, $999 for unlimited.
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
Very competitive pricing.
I don't have experience in running it in the Enterprise, but it's a very solid choice for running a SME off of - at a far lower cost than Microsoft. We had around 200 users running on OSX and Windows with roaming profiles, centralised user management, 5TB of network shares, network printing all on a couple of Tiger servers.
Yes, the hardware costs are greater - but the software costs are much much lower.
1) A fully working version of Outlook needs to be available on OS X. This means proper support for public folders (email, contacts, and calendars), accessing directory information (GAL), task requests, etc. Outlook Web Access sucks, having to make Mac users use Citrix to access Outlook on Windows sucks, and Entourage is a joke.
2) Proper support of Active Directory integration, without third-party utilities.
3) Support for something similar to Group Policy (or having GP objects for OS X able to get added to an existing Active Directory setup) so we can control user's machines.
We can deal with Office lagging a bit, or not having Access available on the Mac. But these three things, especially #1, are what's keeping Macs from coming into the office both here and at many other places. Given how weakly these items have been implemented over the past few years, I'm not holding my breath for any major improvements in the near future.
Why would it be a violation of the license to buy a new mac and an OEM copy of Windows - isn't that exactly what OEM copies are designed for, purchase with a new computer?
The challenge, though, is reducing costs in a way that produces savings that actually translate from the spreadsheet to real-world operations, whereas up-front purchase prices are guaranteed savings realizable without any effort.
Man-hour reductions are even harder to realize since unlike dollar savings, it's often impossible to accrue the savings in a way that makes eliminating a FTE realistic -- employees who save 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there can't always have that time savings turned into either less work or fewer people.
And then there are the intangible considerations -- managers who don't want reduced headcount for power/empire reasons, fears of reduced QoS from lower headcounts, more complicated time/personnel management, let alone the challenges of switching a computing platform.
And then there's the issues of "general" expenses like power savings that almost nobody notices or cares about except at the most macro level where switching platforms might not even be noticed as anything other than a statistical abberation.
This is what apple needs the mini does not count as you can get in as easy as an desktop, it uses higher cost laptop parts, and it has the pos gma 950 that is very slow with vista and likely will be with 10.5 3d desktop.
Apple needs a head less desktop with desktop parts and the mac pro costs too much for basic desktop uses.
Also APPLE IF YOU RELAY WANT TO GET IN TO CORPORATE MARKET coming with mac osx for all hardware!
We talking desktops or servers?
/AC parent
If desktops, then you are a troll.
If servers, why pay more for a peice of hardware with an expensive OS when you can just get FreeBSD.
Linux is for the fanboy. BSD is for the paid.
Which the grandparent hadn't even bothered to read up on. "It's a Mac it can't do those stuff". Yet OSX Server is a drop in replacement for an NT Domain server without the honerous CAL pricing (It's SAMBA/LDAP/CUPS etc etc with a decent centralised management toolset).
I'm wondering what your problems were exactly, mac os x ships with a kerberos auth client, and I thought it supported NFS out of the box.
I've been doing a project where I may want to setup NFS or kerberos (future planning, nothing like that now) and was just interested in any problems I may run into. Basically I have the option of deploying some cool networking stuff, and may end up doing it as a learning experience.
Sleep is for the weak.
The Mac Mini is only $600 and comes with more software than a typical $500 PC. My experience is that Macs require much less maintenance than Windows PCs so the total cost of ownership is significantly lower even for the more expensive models.
Isn't Apple's Open Directory for Mac OS X Server equivalent to Active Directory? Also GPO support is available for Macs via Centrify's DirectControl software for those that insist on living in a Microsoft Active Directory world.
Yeah! Because it's fucking wrong to have a BSD-based OS on a desktop. Burn OS X, BURN IT!!!!11!!
These days even SMBs want e-mail, tasks, calendars and contact lists that follow them around. Exchange and over the air sync services like Good Mobile Messaging provide that. When Apple can offer that they *might* get a foot in the door.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
There is no dispute that most custom business apps are written to Windows...
I'll dispute it. My company's been writing custom business apps on only Linux/BSD/OS X for 6 years now. Never written a single custom business app for Windows. I don't make any claims about the rest of the world, but in my sphere of influence ALL custom apps are NOT "written to Windows."
Flame on!
I'm a big mac fanboy, but it sounds like *you* don't know what you're talking about.
A lot of business apps, nasty as it is, are VB based, or require IE.
Also, OS X/Open Directory doesn't come close to Windows/AD. You simply can't lock down a Mac environment the same way you can on Windows, and you don't have near the number of management tools or control that you do with AD.
I wish you could do all this stuff on the Mac...I really do, but you can't.
You made your point yourself, even if it's not glaringly obvious. "most of the important" and "most of the "custom stuff"".
I own several semi recent macs, so lets get that out of the way. I can do "most" of my business needs, you're right. Here are a few apps I can't use...anything to open a 1-2-3 spreadsheet (it might exist, hadn't looked to hard), avaya IP phone software, lucent phone monitoring software. These are not every business applications but they are ones I am forced to use. That means no mac for work, and there are probably hundreds of little proprietary applications that can't be reproduced that companies use like this.
I'll agree once you get a mac that has no hardware problems, you're going to have less work to do than windows. The trick is getting that mac with no hardware problems. If you haven't had one, you're lucky. I've had 5 macs with major hardware issues out of the box....and if you've had them repair your machine flawlessly, you're lucky there too. None of mine have been repaired where they didn't cosmetically damage something or just mess up the repair completely. I just don't expect to see companies dealing with high failure rates. If their published failure rate is low, I would be suprised because I've had many other and off brand PC's that haven't had these issues.
Your mileage might have varied, but I can't believe I am the only one this happened to.
Hell, why not really go nuts? Keep the MacBooks for a couple of years, and instead of throwing them out when you upgrade, hire someone whose sole job is to eBay the old ones to recoup some of their costs.
The article discussed mainly enterprise applications like file and print servers. Quietly Apple has been positioning itself in this area with hardware like XServe and XRAID. Software is slowly developing, but remember OS X is Unix based so many Unix applications will require porting and not full re-writes. At least one application, XSan is interesting. The ability to turn any and all your Apple servers into a huge SAN. There is potential. Corporate desktops may come later.
The last time I checked the vast majority of businesses use applications like Office and Quickbooks which are available for OS X. Custom applications will not work, but the vast majority of businesses are small businesses which can't afford custom software.
True, nobody but only MS has Active Directory. For Windows file compatibility, you can run Samba and OS X does support all sorts of other LDAP protocols.
Many small businesses could benefit from the lower TCO of running Macs. Less IT staffing for example. Many of the core business software like Office and Quickbooks is available for OS X. So why not?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Has adopted a 'do it yur damn self' approach to desktop and deskside support. So from the perspective of which costs less to maintain Windows vs anything else, they've already made the decision that they don't care and it makes no difference. Reduced productivity is preferable to hiring someone to fix it. Of course wherever possible patch and software maintenance and updates are automated and desktop builds are standardized in as much as a such a diverse bunch of desktops are deployed and they do a good job of it(and make no mistake - corporate desktops are often the models that vendors can't sell so they're weird orphans to begin with). But if someone came to them and explained how if they deployed Macs which cost 20% more and would incur far less maintenance overhead, they'd be laughed out of the room because the suits already assume that the financial cost to THEM is zero.
If you don't believe this then why is so much IT work going to India and South America where the pure productivity derived from projects that have to connect and communicate North America with these locations is so much worse, and so popular at the same time?
Corporate car fleets are cheap ass Fords, not Camrys. We should learn from this example.
The Apple store lets you configure an XServe with 3x80gb drives, if you want, and you can purchase SoftRAID to provide RAID 5 capability. http://www.softraid.com/ is $129.
1. Macs do run XP now. 2. You can run most apps via virtualisation. 3. A Mac Mini is $599- who knows what kinda discount a corporation would get for buying 3000 of them. 4. We DO NOT know what is coming at Macworld. Maybe wait and see huh?
The funny thing to me is, the PHB's never calculate the employee downtime into the picture. For example, sure maybe you can save yourself a $40,000 tech if you are running macs and you have less problems, but they don't take into account the $100,000 of lost sales when the sales team can't work because their PC shit itself.
In 2002, Apple made it up to 5th place in servers with a 1.5% US market share. (Outside the US, zilch.)
By 2005, they were in 10th place with an 0.5% worldwide market share. (Article title: "Apple gaining momentum in server market". Maybe 2004 was worse.)
You know that cou can buy drives elsewhere and put them in, do you?
No indeed no click and drool tools comparible to MOM, but why should I need that if I can use Open(LDAP) Directory, why do I need GPO's when I got remote shell access, it's a unix in it's base you can script the hell out of the system. For coroporate you need: Authentication, Authorization, shared resources and policy based restrictions, now all that can be done from the comfort of a command line, you know the thing you use when you want to automate a repetetive task in a corporate situation where you got more boxes then fingers and toes.
However some fine tuning will be needed to fully mimic GPO, MS did really a great job there, althouhg GPO are usually used to prevent uncorporate behaviour like installing unauthorized software, automatic distributing of MSI packages and logon/off scripts to set resources. But keep in mind the the NT philosophy of user friendly is quite the opposite of unix in general, though MacOSX has made some improvements for the GUI handicapped users.
The problem in your argument is the assumption that Apple does not have something that competes in all of those spaces. But Apple has actually had centralized management for much longer than it has been available for Windows, and it is generally an easier-to-administer system. And system imaging is much easier on the Mac side.
m l
Now for the details:
For the AD/GPO side you have MacOS X Server's OpenDirectory and Workgroup Management. The later product stared out in the MacOS 7 days as "Macintosh Manager" and was available as part of AppleShare IP product. You can do an awful lot of locking down on the computer with the point-and-click components, including setting the users to use network home directories (pretty much the same avrients as are available on Windows). A good begining point for this would be Apple's page on MacOS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/desktop_management.ht
For imaging you have a number of choices: You can make up a computer as you would like it imaged, then use the free imaging tools that are included with the OS (Disk Utility has absorbed this capability, it used to be part of ASR). Then you can either push it back onto the computer using Disk Utility again, or use the image to NetBoot computers from a MacOS X Server (technically you don't need server, but it makes it easier), use the free NetBoot/NetRestore system to allow you to cause network-based imaging to happen, use the free tool Radmind to keep the image in sync (complex settings possible, and you can update one computer then let the rest follow it automatically), or use any of the other techniques that are out there (LANRev, NetOctopus, etc).
Oh... and an image you make of one computer will boot all computers that that OS supports (computers much older, or newer than the OS won't work), there are a few tricks and traps to that, but not many that matter. And there is currently the caveat that you need 2 images: one for PPC and one for Intel.
And on the remote software install party, Apple Remote Desktop does this wonderfully. It even allows for broadcast installing and leaving a package on a server so that disconnected users will get it the next time they connect.
Oh, and then you can also use AD servers to do all of this management if you would like, either through schema modification or adding a MacOS X Server on the side.
All this that you ask for is built in to Mac OSX Server. Disk Image, NetBoot an NetInstall and Server Based user account for desk top and mobile machines, and Mac and Windows users. I use it in my lab, albeit small, but I have read about this being used in Mac networks of over 500 machines. It appears to be scalable.
and oddly enough, Mac OS X works great with Active Directory. An OS X Server is considerably easier to maintain than a Windows XP server, and allows for things like Netboot, network homes, etc. along with fun stuff like VTC (iChat), distributed computing (Xgrid), and the like. Also includes built-in two factor authentication capabilities for those people who might have to deal with PKI. Oh.. and the server also works great with Active Directory and does WINS, master browser and stuff like that for those people who haven't yet migrated to Active Directory.
With unlimited clients for around $1000, it's even cheap compared to an average price on windows XP server environment.
nope. Can't see that anyone would ever want to set up something like that in an enterprise environment.
"You could NOT pay me to admin a Mac computer." Is that your way of saying that if your customers had Macs you would be out of a job?
Why not netboot the macs (keeps the "image" consistent), and have a file server that has the users' home directory on it (old school "roaming profile")? Wouldn't that do the same thing? (excuse my lack of windows networking expertise, I have managed to avoid that...)
As a consultant I have dealt with many shops that have one admin type person for up to 100 PC's. It just requires pre-planning and a good initial infrastructure. Of course that won't solve hardware issues, but software issues can be nipped in the butt.
For me setting up a new shop of about 100 PC's would be easy. And I could easily have it done by a single person on day to day activities with 3 maybe 4 servers (DC, file server and secondary DC, SMS/AV server, and an ISA server with filtering software to prevent spyware sites) But then again I have years of Windows experience, and enough Mac experience to know my way around them.
The Mac Mini at $599.00 is really a different animal than the ~$500 Box you'd get from dell or the like. And the first Minis (the PPC ones) were woefully underpowered such that it had difficulty running the supplied OS in its standard configuration. I bought one and was very disapointed with it. The new ones may be better, but I'm sure not going to fork out another $599 to find out. Also, they are only a viable option if you already have usb keyboard and mouse plus a monitor. If you need those, you'll end up, price wise, in the Core 2 Duo desktop with 19" flat panel range.
If Apple was serious about this space they'd come out with a ~$1000 expandable box, or even a Mini that you could easily open and upgrade (poping the case open with a pair of putty knives and voiding the warranty isn't a viable option most places). Frankly, Apple equipment is aimed at consumers and high end video/audo workstation users. None of their equipment, IMHO, is appealing to enterprise.
Hiperbole = not a word.
In English, anyways.
Almost everything you just described can be done with a Mac OS X Server box and Apple Remote Desktop. Macs support Active Directory. They also support remote installation of software, NetBoot and Network Install, and Network Home Directories.
About the only thing on your list that's missing is Exchange/Outlook. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's been well noted for the last 20 years that apples have lower techinician to user ratios than say windows. That means in heterogenius envirnoments there are relatively fewer mac IT folks. This leads to two problems 1) when it comes time to vote on things or downselect on platforms the Windows people out number the mac folks. and 2) when something really difficult needs to be done, like getting some active directory to fail over properly on a heterogenous network, or to figure out why NFS is slow off of the apple raid server, then there's less of a critical mass of expertise and manpower make the change. Without that depth chances are some problems will be insurmountable despite the system being on the whole easier to maintain.
Thus if it's the IT dept that is advising corporate decsion making you get people voting for their jobs and expertise and saying they can't solve the problems on the macs. In reality if they just had a slightly bigger mac IT department that most of the time twidded it's thumbs like the maytag repairman but was ready to fight the big fires, they could overall have a smaller IT dept.
There's simply no question that macs are easier to maintain on a day to day basis. But you need the depth of IT staff to fight the big fires and few mac IT depts have that.
Over and Over I see the same happening to the linux techs who, after being hired for unix, are sucked in to the Windows vortex that consumes all IT resources, leading us to want to hire yet another unix tech.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Apple is going in the right direction. Active Directory in terms of failover and replication still beats the pants off of open directory. Open directory is good, but it feels like NT 4's style of domain architecture: Master and slave replicas, manual promotion/demotion, and no seamless failover. Active Directory is nice, multi-master replication with inter/intra-site DC failover.
Love Microsoft or not, Group Polices rock. They are very flexible, and can tweak very detailed settings right out of the box. You can even make custom ADM templates if you are so inclined.
Workgroup manager is a start, but it is not very flexible (no ability for machine specific settings VS user specific settings). I expect OD and AD integration to keep getting better, but as it stands now, it isn't really ready for enterprise use.
Still, Microsoft should look over its shoulder. Apple is coming to eat Redmond's lunch. The next few years should be fun to watch.
-ted
And big networks NEED this kind of functionality.
Everything you described is available on Mac OS X, and IMHO, easier.
You create a "standard" image of Windows for these machines, and keep the image on the network, and use Ghost (or equivalent) to push images onto the client PCs.
Mac OS X server does this easily, except you don't need Ghost, because you just boot the image over the network. And if you want to change the image, you just change it on the server and reboot the clients. If you just want to install some new software on the clients, you set up a Network Install image and they auto-discover and auto-install it. Or you can use Apple Remote Desktop if you want to schedule it. It's even better than SMS because building your own packages is not a pain in the ass. There's even an Automator action for it.
If you want to REALLY get crazy, you give everyone a roaming profile, so any machine they login to has all their stuff.
How is this crazy? Networked home folders are nothing new. Mac OS X even supports roaming profiles for Windows (it's NT4, not AD, but it still works).
Yes, it's a lot of work.
It's much less work on Mac OS X. I suggest you actually get informed before saying things like "Macs would be somewhat workable if you had a SMALL network, I guess."
Why on Earth would an enterprise server want software RAID 5? Seriously, don't even bother without a RAID card that supports RAID 5.
"Oh boy"
Thanx for the lucid comment. Something I'm sure this thread will be low on. You are correct in pointing out that currently some specialized tools are not available and un-replaceable on the mac platform. The point is that the news story we are commenting on was about Apple looking seriously at the Enterprise IT market not about Apple claiming they could replace it in the second quarter of 2007. The original comment poster for "it's hopeless", by the very title of his comment, implies that there is no chance in hell it could ever become possible. And those of us who think with our mind and not with our lemming node know that it is more than just possible. As far as your issues with hardware and repair are concerned. I am no aware of such widespread problems but don't doubt they happen. I have not had that happen in any of my large mac implementations (and unlike the poster suggests most are not in design firms). Conversely, I have had Dell ship me 8 servers and 150 workstations that were nowhere near the ones their "Sales Tech Expert" and I discussed/designed and I subsequently ordered for a client. The process of getting this little problem resolved became so complex and impossible that my client just "ate" the systems and compromised where needed.
"This message was sent from an Apple
You DO realize that you can do the same under Mac OS X? In fact it's even easier!
NetBoot
Workgroup Manager
These services are extremely simple to set up and manage. In my opinion they are much easier to manage than Ghost and Active Directory or their equivalents on the Windows side of things.
Sapere aude!
informative and useful info
The killer app with active directory is group policy. Even though OS X server works with active directory, it doesn't have ANYTHING that can touch the granularity to control your client base that Active Directory provides. I believe that is what the grandparent was talking about.
About the only thing on your list that's missing is Exchange/Outlook. :-)
.Mac substitute >>> Exchange/Outlook.
.Mac"!
Mail.app + iCal + AddressBook + iChat + iSync + internal
Here's hoping we see that internal "enterprise
It's probably okay if you buy it all as a bundle. However, Apple doesn't sell such an option. And when you buy a Parallels bundle it doesn't come with the OEM version, either.
If you purchased from an Apple reseller who was also a Windows reseller, then ostensibly they could bundle OEM Windows. And if they sold more than a couple copies, Microsoft would just prevent them from getting OEM windows for resale.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hiperbole = not a word.
In English, anyways. Associated press release: "Today a combatant in the region of Dar Five was seen attacking a tank in the streets of Mogadefoot. Since he was only armed with a toilet plunger he resigned himself to strongly criticize the fact that they tank's camouflage color scheme did not match the paint of the house behind it. Followup at 11!
"This message was sent from an Apple
when Mac OS gives me DFS support like my windows and unix based servers...
and the easter egg from MacWorld will be some podCAST tools and LDAP proxy that allows you to not have to double bind to get authentication services from AD and policy settings from Open Directory binding. still no DFS which is pathetic.
go sell some kids some ipods apple, thats all you are really good at.
I need to have the server here and operational in one week for installation of the server software by the vendor. Of course this installation was scheduled BEFORE hardware approval was given and IT was only notified of the hardware need two days ago. Purchasing the system (which you cannot purchase bare without drives anyway), purchasing additional drives and then doing hardware install plus server OS reinstall will take time that I don't have. Besides which why should I have to go purchase additional drives from another vendor?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
An OEM copy of Windows is licensed for a very specific computer (legal snafu). That OEM copy is more then likely a disk image that will only work on that specific model line of computer the OEM license was for (technical snafu). I can see no other way around this unless you specifically bought a Windows OEM license from Apple designated specifically for your Mac or you have something in a site wide license agreement.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Sure it can. But how many places run NT PDCs still, versus W2K, W2K3? "The following functionalities are not provided by Samba-3: ... Acting as a Windows 2000 Domain Controller (i.e., Kerberos and Active Directory). In point of fact, Samba-3 does have some Active Directory Domain Control ability that is at this time purely experimental that is certain to change as it becomes a fully supported feature some time during the Samba-3 (or later) life cycle. However, Active Directory is more then just SMB it's also LDAP, Kerberos, DHCP, and other protocols (with proprietary extensions, of course)."
So really, your answer is just a little disingenuous to suggest that all these companies can rip out their PDC and dump a Samba box as a "drop in replacement".
If the argument is for low software costs, than Linux obviously blows Apple out of the water on this one, not to mention there is probably a better knowledge base for Linux servers, and they can do all the same things on cheaper hardware.
On the desktop, Apple is beaten by Windows. In the server arena, they are beaten by Linux. Perhaps they should just stick to making computers for 'artists', or whoever it is they are marketing to with those silly commercials.
Apple needs to catch back up to the business software base they had with OS 7-9, There were tons of cool apps for earlier macs that for one reason or another are not available/usable anymore (largly because the transition to OS 10 proabaly was not worth the developer's efforts to go do a re-wite.)
Here are some of the many great business app casualties:
- MS Project
- MS Outlook
- Dragon Power Secretary
- Omniform
- FoxPro
- AppleWorks
- Virtual PC (Intel) (though Crossover Office has promise)
- Classic (on intel)
- Hypercard
Some that did or are making the transition are hobbled versions compared to earlier versions:
- MS Office 2007 (or whatever they will call it it - will be hobbled- no VBA)
- Noton Utilities (if only it had the features of ver 3)
- Apple iWork (read: AppleWorks beyond 6) where is the Spreadsheet and DB?
Then there are others that offer a new better version but no form of backwards compatibility (such as to convert the old files to new):
- PrintShop
- iWork (AppleWorks->Pages)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Great! Where can I buy it?
What, Leopard Server isn't out yet? Then shut the hell up.
I just got a Mac, and I love it, but don't tout features which don't exist yet and expect to be taken seriously. Sure, it's right around the corner, but it makes as much sense as talking about what a great server Vista will make because of feature XYZ. It's vapor until it's delivered and ready to deploy.
Heck, nobody even really knows what Apple is using ZFS for.
I worked in a research lab with about fifty Macs and a couple of Windows machines. I used to do all the support for the Macs in my spare time. Then we got an sys admin who takes care of them all. He spends a lot of his time on the two or three Windows boxes though.
I don't mean to troll, but what exactly are you trying to "lock down" that OS X won't let you?
Last time I ran a mac lab I could limit access and remotely force settings (often with the choice to allow local overrides if desired) to:
Any or all system preference panes
Network and Removable disks
Printers
Program execution (i.e. allow only certain programs)
The Dock
Finder.app
Safari.app
Mail.app
I'll grant you that AD provides a better interface for choosing how machine, group, and user settings are inherited/replaced, but beyond that I have trouble guessing what else I'd want to "lock down". Did I just run a more open lab than most Windows admins would?
If desktops, then you are a troll. and that is why exactly ? Why can't I run a Linux desktop in the enterprise ? I'm doing it right now... and they are doing it at AUDI too...
The truth is that NOBODY except Microsoft needs Windows.
--
WV that tastes a little as der Führers car...
You need to reimage computers each time? My god!, is this the dark ages. Get radmind you silly sod. Oh wait, it's mac only.
Hun, I hate to break this to you, but as a Mac admin watching over hundreds of heavily abused workstations, the tools for OSX are far better.
I gloat to our windows admin every day about how much better my tools are.
The article's title is misleading. It refers to "Apple's Macworld", but Apple doesn't hold Macworld, a convention company is responsible for it. Apple and the Steve Job's keynote is a big part of the attraction of the show, but it isn't Apple's show. There is nothing in the article that suggests Apple has a new focus on corporations. There is the MacIT conference, but that appears to be run by the same company that runs Macworld.
Most new application development in the Enterprise market seems to be web based and can work fine with Macintosh clients. This nonsense about "most business apps are Windows-only" is based on the erroneous assumption that just because there are lots of tiny little companies pooping out their custom apps (which nobody else uses) in visual basic that the Macintosh can't play in the Enterprise market. That's definitely wrong in both the server and the client desktop/mobile markets. There is a Macintosh in the Enterprise future.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You reply to a post about specialized scientific software by talking about the Apple interface guidelines. The fact is that we have a couple of categories of applications, and research oriented software is a separate market, and a first version without a super Mac-centric UI is not an issue. If the Darwine crew ever gets ported to Quartz, then compiling against WineLib would sufficient as a v1.0 port.
Get it on the Mac, get it running, keep rev'ing, with each Rev becoming more Mac friendly.
No, you can't ship an IM client that breaks the UI guidelines, but if you're the only player (or one of three) in the specialized market, then you ship whatever you can and keep rev'ing. Be the first to ship a Mac version, and you'll get more sales... possibly not Mac sales though. If the CEO, CIO, or anyone in a decision making capacity happens to LIKE Macs (runs one at home, whatever), then simply supporting Macs may sell your Windows software... because they hope that when all the pieces are in place, they'll migrate to a Mac network.
People are too short sited and like straw-man arguments to avoid understanding the large chunks of the software market.
"doesn't support RAID 5 and there is no hardware RAID controller option."
HAHAHAHAHAH.
Nice one, troll. I guess I'd better through away my XServe with a megaraid card running raid5.
Raid5 is in software too.
No floppy drive... you crack me up.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Put this into a text file named SoftwareShouldNeverAutoStartItself.reg (name is optional, as long as it has the .reg).
r rentVersion\Run]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cu
"QuickTime Task"=-
"iTunesHelper"=-
Make sure there is a blank line at the end of the file. There also shouldn't be any spaces in "CurrentVersion", so fix that (lameness filter). Save it, and double click on the file. Problem fixed.
This is one thing that always annoys me with Windows apps. They want to install desktop icons and tray icons.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Besides the horrors of Word, there is one more place where Apple could really make a difference and that is document management. All the solutions are hacks onto the existing Windows file system and are just horrible in every way. Using Spotlight and other technologies, Apple should consider adding a document management solution that is elegant and simple to use... And not just focus on IT pros.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I don't know, why don't you explain it to us? Do you work for a company that sells hardware raid solutions or something? Give us a cost/benefit breakdown showing why one is better than the other.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Would you care to tell us what some of the "vast majority" apps are? I'm the registrar in a public school, and we use PCs. The list of software I use several times a day include: A cross platform student information system (database), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop Elements. Everything else is web based. All of these are available on Macintosh, and most of them run better on Macs. The only problem I see with a Mac at my school would be integrating with the Outlook mail server, but even them I'm sure there is some sort of workaround, and there is always the Outlook Web Access in a pinch.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Obviously you have not heard of fink, which is a curated port of about 3000 programs from the Debian package manager. Or of DarwinPorts. Most of KDE and Gnome is in that set by the way. And the pacakge managers actually work on all apples without crazy crap like compat libs and driver patches that eat up time and money. So no Linux does not blow anything out of the water. Additionally, since mac is UNIX it's often not hard to get Linux software to compile on a mac. (and because of fink all the useful libs are there). Finally, it's compatively easy and quite cheap to virtualize linux (or windows) on a mac so you can run nearly anything in Linux at full speed and full screen. The reverse is not true of course. Virtuallizing windows or mac os on random PC hardware is often a time consuming and thus expensive chore with no assured path to compatibility. Ergo apple has much lower TCO for software.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm sorry, but if it takes 6 IT people to support 300 people/computers, then none of the IT people are worth $150K/year, even with benefits and payroll taxes included in that number.
Not to disagree with your other points, but regarding the Mac Mini, my GF and I had the very first one that came out, the 1.25 GHz G4. The stock 256M of RAM is too little we 'upgraded' to 512M of RAM. It worked great for most stuff, occasionally we'd get the pinwheel of death w/ too many applications going. Did you run with only 256M of RAM? That was a mistake, IMHO, Apple should have started with at least 512M RAM at the first go, although they fixed this with the first revision to the mini.
A few months ago we got the stock version of the latest mini, the dual-core Intel. It is $100 more than the older mini, but comes w/ 512M Ram default, and a faster dual-core processor. Much better performance.
But IMHO for businesses, if they're seriuosly looking at the mini, it's probably worth going just $400 more, at least to the 17" iMac, which gives you the built-in display, dual-core processor, keyboard/mouse, all in a nice small-footprint. At $1000 a pop, it's not a bad desktop solution for most situations. (yeah, yeah, i know you can buy a dell w/ screen for $500, but let's compare apples to apples).
Other than that I totally agree with you, lamenting the lack of a middle option between the iMacs and the $2500 Mac Pro. Ie, it would be nice if Apple had a headless box w/ expandable slots, in the $1000 to $1500 range.
make world, not war
*Blink*...umm, you're kidding I assume?
We run all of our low I/O file servers on a Raid 5 (with a hot spare) array. You can't beat the price/utilization ratio there. Yeah, you don't get the same performance as Raid 1, but if space is a priority it's the way to go.
I think one of the single most important factors holding back the Macintosh in the corporate arena is the lack of a clearly defined product lifecycle for OS X. Correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody outside Apple seems to know, on authority, how much longer we'll receive security updates for 10.3 or 10.4.
It's difficult to justify widely deploying any given platform, even one as nice as OS X, if you don't know when the product will be forcefully obsoleted.
Of course, Windows Admins are better at it than anyone else - they get so much more practise at maintaining and fixing things and practise makes perfect...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The problem is that you could run an office with a thousand monkeys on typewriters if you planned and forethought it enough. But in the real world there are just too many people/PHBs/IT staff that are just average when it comes to planning and execution. This is a problem of /.- most of the knowledgable posters here are above the average and tend to forget that the average person is going to screw up a bit more.
Anyway, in my own experience (cue ancedotal music), I have had less problems with Macs.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Maybe you should read up a bit on Mac solutions before you comment- software like Apple Remote Desktop, FileWave, NetOctopus, NetBoot/NetRestore, Radmind, HP OpenView, Deep Freeze and resources like AFP548, Mac Managers, MacOSX Labs, MacEnterprise, and of course Apple itself (I'll leave finding Apple's website as an exercise for the reader ;) make running large Macintosh installations fairly easy. There are plenty of UNIX/CLI tools and scripts out there, and Apple offers professional certifications if you want paper to show a potential employer.
OEM copies of Windows can be purchased from just about every major online retailer and will install on any hardware. The only major difference between them and the boxed retail copies is that you can't get technical support from Microsoft. They are not to be confused with machine-specific restore disks the big vendors like to use.
"Macs are more expensive."
I know this is flame, but since I am now typing on my shiny new MacBook Pro my wife bought me....
She was afraid she spent too much on the laptop, so I went to Dell and IBM to try and compare similar laptops. Core 2 Duo at 2.2Gig, 2 Gig memory, 120 Gig drive, 15" screen- I could find anything comparable within $800.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Three servers run virtualization software (although usually only two is running a single OS at a time), which run one copy of Windows 2003 enterprise server, running as a primary domain controller for a windows 2003 active directory. Another is a backup domain controller, that's usually used when we need to reboot the first for updates. This virtualisation software does regular synchronisations to the other servers. Every now and then, we may need to take a server offline, switch the server being used. The virtaulisation software will just move the Windows installation onto another server, synchronize, bring it online without interupting anything (to the OS, it doesn't even realized it's been moved to another computer, continues handling the various server tasks it was doing in the middle of the move happily).
There is the file server cluster, consisting of Linux servers running Samba (all working together). The filesystem is replicated between each of these servers, there is a very dumb router that does process off-loading. A heartbeat system between the cluster is also setup -- so should any of the servers go down, we won't have to worry about the dumb off-loading system shoving connections to a dead server. To the network, these cluster of servers really just appear as one server.
Additionally these fileservers also ran some proxies for IIS, was faster to ship SMS updates and less intensive on the server that way.
The client workstations are setup to network boot and then boot from the harddrives. The reason for this, is if you wanted to reimage a computer for any reason, you just log into into the imaging server (We had a web interface to handle this -- The server just contains a bunch of pre-setup OS images, UFTP and the DHCP server for the network) and tell it that next time it receives a DHCP request from computer X (we had the Mac addresses aliased for each computer) to run a small linux installation off the network and automatically image said computer with whatever image we wanted -- it takes on average seven minutes to image a entire computer.
The client computers mostly used a Windows (some ran Linux -- but that's another story) with roaming profiles, thanks to our clustering system and Linux in particular, roaming profiles was insanely fast (much faster than running it off windows we found).
We never had to worry about upgrading the master domain controller's hardware or downtime thanks to virtualisation. Hardware issue? Just move the virtualized guest OS to another server, and fix it, or replace with entirely new hardware.
Some update botched up the windows server installation somehow? Just roll back the harddrive image that contained the OS installation (domain data was kept on another virtualized harddrive).
All the Windows clients were managed pretty much by group policies set on the domain controller. Admittedly, some software installations weren't always just adding it to a list of software to be installed, as some software didn't come in a MSI container/package.
I have a very hard time visualizing in my head putting such a 'nice' setup together with just OS X. Especially on a network that cannot afford to have *ANY* downtime.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Possibly. Mac would have more jobs and I may go there (cough cough).
/original AC
Ever try and fix a Mac? It's either disk repair or reinstall. Who the hell knows what's going on behind the scenes? It's spooky man.
Out of about 50 desktop users in my company, we migrated about half to Macs over the last 3 years. The results were spectacular from a maintenance and security standpoint and even better from a user productivity standpoint. In fact, most of those former Windows-only users ditched their home XP machines and bought Macs. We also deployed an Xserve 3 years ago which runs our Windows and AFP file sharing (and Windows domain). It's been fast, solid and wayyyyyyy cheaper to run than any of the Windows servers [licensing].
Say what you will. Anyone who blindly installs Windows systems without really looking at alternatives should get fired.
--------------Apple - where "people_ready" isn't just a marketing slogan.
Most of the stuff on
> ... can buy drives elsewhere and put them in
Not really; the 'Xserve' model is intended for full-service support with
short turnaround, and the warranty is void if non-Apple RAM or drives
are installed (but the warranty includes some nifty plus-es, is served onsite etc.).
If you need flexibility, getting a server-software-equipped desktop machine
is the way to go; there's a bunch of drive drawers, and third-party addons
are not discouraged by Apple. Warranty service, though, might be carry-in/days.
The original poster, however, doesn't need flexibility. He just needs to
pay for the 750 MB drives and accept that he's getting more than bare
minimum.
Feel free to suggest a workable scenario/solution of how you could replace this network infrastructure with OS X.
Don't forget to mention the benefits of such a system over the existing scenario I gave.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Nobody Cares About The Operating System (TM).
body massage!
Nope. I'm just disputing his claim that there's "no dispute that most custom business apps are written to Windows." Since I provided one data-point to dispute his claim, I've shown that there is a dispute. Really, though, aside from my incomprehensible sense of humor, the attitude that 'all business blah blah blah is always windows' just bugs me, because I've spent years and years doing non-windows business programming.
>It doesn't matter at all because the vast majority of business applications are not available for the mac.
No person, no business, needs 'the vast majority of' available software.
Macintosh computers work and are priced fairly. Some arrogant
dismissal doesn't change that.
1. I was talking about software RAID 5, not just no RAID 5.
2. Hardware RAID 5 is faster, I somehow doubt you want your enterprise server to be wasting it's clock cycles calculating CRC values for your array. Not to mention you'll probably get more actual sockets (be they PATA or SATA, or something else) on the expansion card. Don't forget the software is generally better compared with onboard motherboard stuff and it's likely it'll be faster rebuilding an array if a disk goes down.
"Oh boy"
Fairly? That's one way to look at it I guess. Another way is that the majority of business users will be served just fine by a $500 PC, and that apple's only offering in that price range is expensive and comparatively difficult to expand. In business, it simply doesn't matter that your computer looks sexier than the next guy.
Or put another way, pretty much any business whose needs are suited by OSX... they'd also be suited by Linux, which would be even cheaper. So why use MacOS, which ties you to specific hardware? It's not like there's anything special about Apple hardware any more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh.. they will... but the performance is so horrible it is almost unusable. Try hooking it up to a big NFS based NAS or SAN and moving some real data.
It's true that the G4 mini is underpowered for general purpose work, although mine does great as an HTPC running EyeTV and VLC and some custom Java and Python to control them. I'm actually surprised I haven't needed to upgrade from 256MB. The Intel minis should have more than enough CPU power for most users, although I hope they get a Core 2 upgrade soon.
If Apple was serious about this space they'd come out with a ~$1000 expandable box, or even a Mini that you could easily open and upgrade (poping the case open with a pair of putty knives and voiding the warranty isn't a viable option most places)
Opening the mini doesn't void the warranty unless you break something, but I completely agree that there needs to be an expandable Mac under $2000.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I know companies have ordered the Xserve with 1 CPU and 2 small drives,
and an external RAID solution - stop trying to stuff the HD into the Xserve,
just get the two 80GB Drives and an external RAID box.
It's just not expandable like most PCs are.
If you want to call hardware that can't be upgraded 'quality', go ahead, but in my eyes that's just cheap.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
This comment is particularly hilarious in it's lack of history.
The point of the mac mini is everyone was bitching that all low-cost Macs CAME with displays (old bondi iMac for example), and if you wanted a non-display option you'd have to get the expensive powermac.
So what does Apple do, they create the mac mini to address those complaints.
And then you, who complain that it doesn't come with a monitor.
If they created your $1000 expandable box, then next year I can look forward to a posting claiming it is either too expensive, not upgradable enough (I can't upgrade the CPU! WAH!), or that it does/doesn't/shouldn't/couldn't have/want/need a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
Finally, the mac mini works great for many users. You are probably not one of those users. Deal with it.
PS: As for their equipment appealing to enterprise - who in the enterprise are you suggesting? At my work (most definitely an "enterprise"), about 30-50% of the people I see are schlepping a mac book pro around. The reason why they have it is because the company had the vision to provide the platform people were asking for. How is equipment not appealing to this enterprise?
Great! Where can I buy it?
Here.
Pretty much all of the features listed in the GP post except the last one or two are in Tiger Server, which has been available since April of 2005.
Next time, remove head from sphincter before posting.
~Philly
Can you point to information about RAID 5 in software? I tried the OS X RAID documentation on Apple's site and it said RAID 0 or 1.
So I should have to go to a third party vendor and price separate RAID hardware and drives to put into my Xserve? You don't think Apple should be offering RAID as standard configuration in their build to order?
All I'm hearing here is that I can't use Apple as a true enterprise vendor because every solution people suggest requires doing things like ripping out the drive that came with the Xserve, installing third party hardware and drives. You think this is better than single sourcing a correctly configured server and having all of the hardware be under a single support contract?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
There is a whole tranch of much more basic stuff that Tiger does not do such as DFS shares, no SMB signing etc. You can make Mac's work much better in a AD setup, but you have to shell more money out to a third party. ADmitMAC-vs-Tiger
To work in a corporate enviroment you need to be able to setup a Mac so that any random user on the system can walk upto the Mac and logon, have their network drive home folder automatically mapped to the computer, and a kerberos ticket stored and used with my web browser, when mapping windows shares, when doing LDAP queries etc. In addition my mail program needs to talk to the Exchange server in native protocols.
Maybe Lepoard will bring all these features, I would be very happy if it did. However I doubt that it will :-(
You are correct about the Mac Pro actually being a more flexible server platform than the Xserve. The issue is that I need the unit to be rack mountable.
And you are also correct in that I need to just pay EXTRA for equipment I DON'T NEED because of Apple's inflexibility. I also needed a spare part kit because I can't get proper support turnaround from Apple in my region (never mind that I live in a major American city).
Indeed this is exactly what I specced out. The problem was that when it hit the bean counters the parts kit and large drives pushed the system over budget by more than $1500.
I think my point is valid and not flaming. If Apple wants to compete in the enterprise market they can't just offer one server model with very few configuration options. Sure you can go to third party vendors to get hardware RAID or properly sized drives etc. but now you have multiple parts from multiple vendors covered by multiple warranties and service contracts. Great if you have a couple of servers to manage but not if you have a couple dozen or more.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I've had to use two intel based minis at work. They work well for certain situations. Apple never ships Macs with enough ram. You should never order a Mac without double what they ship with as a rule. Mac OS 10.4 requires 512MB ram to open most applications or multitask in a reasonable fashion. 10.5 will probably require 768MB to be tolerable.
As for speed, the intel based Mac mini was very fast with native code but unpleasant with Microsoft Office and impossible with Adobe products which at the time were not native. I don't know how far they got with porting yet. At that job, I was a Mac OS Admin for student affairs at a university. The mini worked great in the radio station for the on air computer as it easily integrated into their studio. It also worked well in an office setting. I think apple should start including a keyboard and mouse with them though. Many pc users have mice and keyboards but they are often PS/2. Unless you bought a new PC in the last two years, its not going to have usb devices with it most likely. Even then, I've seen some models with PS/2 keyboards. In an office environment, you often need to swap out keyboards after several years of use. (3-5 before they got a new PC or Mac)
An academic configured iMac with the intel graphics chipset would work great in a typical office. There are software applications that some people can't use, but we did have a newspaper and radio station running on 99% Macs when I left. Both had one PC for accounting purposes as the university used an IE based payroll system. We did not want to deploy bootcamp in a beta stage nor make new disk images for it.
The old mac minis had good video and the new ones are lacking on that front. The CPU speed is much better and the ram is a wash. It all depends on what you intend to use it for though. I wouldn't spend $599 or less on a store bought PC or Mac to game on. Its also not going to work well for someone needing photoshop. If you are going to use word and view webpages its more than adequate. I believe iMacs work in the office and home for most people very well. You can still add ram and its not fun but possible to upgrade the hard drive.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I hate to break it to you, but contrary to popular opinion Microsoft isn't the government. The only way Microsoft can audit you is if you let it do so. So what's the solution? Don't let it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I thought Sun was the Apple of the enterprise world.
Caveat Utilitor
I develop software on contract, and I'd say upwards of 90% of all software development is done for in-house purposes. A great, great deal of that has historically been the classic VB front end to a database. There are many of these old VB5-type applications still in use, and they won't run on a Mac. And they won't be rewritten anytime soon either. New client-side development tends to be done with .Net. A lot of web apps depend on ActiveX.
The great majority of custom programming in the enterprise is Windows-client specific. Denying this is simply denying the reality of the state of IT. I agree that it sucks, by the way, which is why I don't take such contracts anymore.
Apple still doesn't got it. WebObjects was one of the first application servers and it is still great and more advanced than all the other stuff in that area. Despite this Apple has shrunk all its efforts to market and support it to nearly zero. Yes, they still maintain it (since they use it inhouse too (for their Website and the iTMS)) but the periods between new versions grow longer and longer and the times when new features were introduced are long gone. They also stopped advertising for it a long time ago and it merely plays a minor part on WWDC. WebObjects was one of the apps that meant "Enterprise IT" for NeXT, in fact it was NeXTs financial butt-saver until Apple came along.
Regards
It's about time someone took notice of what is hopefully going ot be an emerging trend in the corporate world. Myself I administer a WAN of 10 user to about 7 machines. It used to be a commodity hardware+windows solution maintained by one person (me). I konw I'm opening myself up to a lot of criticism here, but for this small environment windows was a big problem. It's easy to say this, but securitywise it's a total PITA to be one guy administering a LAN/WAN of windows machines, especially when logins are shared (yes, bad I know... but we are small). Every other day I'd get calls about network issues or printers just disappearing for what seems to be without reason. A simple reboot would usually take care of whatever the problem was.
I think anyone reading slashdot would say that a reboot isn't such a big deal. I would tend to agree. I don't think the average person trying to enter in medical billing charges or look at a medical schedule of patients would agree however. In a service based industry, I am not a fan of keeping the customer any longer than ness. which means things just need to work. Something that windows was just not doing for me/our organization.
About a year and a half ago now, a friend came to me with a new 12" powerbook she had purchased with a question about configuring wireless networking. Apparently the (large enterprise) that she works for didn't have any IT staff skilled enough to figure out how to configure Airport to operate on their (windows centric) secure wireless network. So, sitting in her car in an Applebees parking lot I took a look at it (first time ever touching a mac with OS X on it) and had it figured and configured in about 30 seconds. I fell in love with it.
So after that short experience I did some reading and learning about how it works and what it is and isn't. I made a small leap. I gave my boss a 15" powerbook and ordered up a 17" powerbook for myself. After a couple of months and with the introduction of the mac mini and great pricing on the iMacs I had our organization switched to an all apple solution, and haven't had any issues with any of the machines running currently. In fact a windows application that we used to use for our medical billing and scheduling is now something holding us back, and to tackle that I use virtualization. Thankfully, the use of windows in a VM is for older patient accounts, since everything has been moved to a new mac based application ("Macpractice" if you're curious... We've been happy with it, as it runs on MySQL instead of PostgreSQL like our former application "Intergy" for those that want to know).
Even migrating everything to an Xserve just recently has proven painless and everything that I had running our enterprise on a G4 mac mini running tiger server migrated smoothly and only took a couple of hours of my time to get back to where it should be. The fact that the architechture changed (from G4 to Intel quad Xeon) wasn't even an issue. In fact the only issues I'm having at the moment is getting our legacy software back up and running in a VM so that we can continue to close out old accounts (as db conversion was cost prohibitive, so we still need to run it). And this is slightly trivial, since I don't need to run it in a VM, I just choose to, so I can take the former windows server and put it to use as a (free)NAS (server) somewhere else.
In summary, making the switch to Apple has left me with little to do outside of educating people to use only one mouse button and counseling them in their state of "culture shock" when confronted with somehting different than what they use at home or elsewhere. What I anticipated to be a hard switch has been more painless than upgrading to the latest version of windows. At the very least, I'm glad I'm salaried, otherwise I'd be making very little, considering how little I actually have to do anymore. To my windows counterparts (a friend of mine sells service contracts for PC's like craaazy), kudos to you for keeping the service industry alive.
Apple is the epitome of counter-corporate culture. Having visited the "temple" of Apple they are anything but corporate. They sell computers to individuals, not to corporations, that is their mantra. They only give lip service to the corporate or enterprise applications. They will always cater to individual. With their best selling product being the iPod, why would they need to sell to corporations. It's all about the consumer.
I need the ability to plug my mp3 player into any random computer to copy music onto and off of it, because I learn about new music almost exclusively from having friends give it to me. This is legal in my jurisdiction (Canada), so don't get all huffy about copyright on me.
Period.
Until OS X can run on Dells, it is inappropriate for corporate use.
How to remove data in Active Directory after an unsuccessful domain controller demotion.
I believe this will work if you have a DC die on you and you are not planning on recovering it.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Part of the EULA for Windows is agreeing to the possibility of being audited. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is the group that usually carries out the audits on behalf of Microsoft (and several other large vendors). So you can't actually use Windows without having first agreed to subjecting yourself from audits. And there is precedent for enforcement of these audits with the aid of Federal Marshalls.
It seems you don't understand the difference between the words "all" and "most". GGP said "most custom business apps are written to Windows", and you're frothing at the mouth trying to say "See! Not all business apps are writtent to Windows!" which doesn't invalidate the original point at all.
(A) It is possible to build a universal 10.4 image....
(B) Radmind is great for software deployment, particularly if you have different applications installed in different locations.
I agree with your other points. But I think what is great about OSX is that it runs atop a kind of *NIX : Darwin. For administration that is where the power of using a Mac is today.
How did you measure the improvement in security, productivity, and maintenance and what percentage was each and exactly how does "spectacular" rate to a real world number? I ask because you mention very specific things that were improved so I assume you have some actual real data to show that as well.
I can say that our company measures maintenance costs year after year that pertain to the actual OS and hardware but those costs are very low right now so even if they went to zero, it would be a small amount of actual overall IT costs. 95% of our support costs is with applications or how do I do this. I can give some examples of our security costs as well. We patch about 1000 machines every month. The testing is handled by one person creating a software push that is pushed to all desktops and takes effect on the next reboot, that software package with all of the security updates takes about 2 hours to make and a few seconds to deploy to a 1000 workstations. The testing of the patches takes one IT trainer and one IT support person a dedicated 1-2 hours each. That same system would be in place including the server that pushes the packages regardless of what OS we were running because anything done to 1000 machines would naturally be automatted including our own non security software updates. Our costs only increase by the number of patches that are deployed as the testing time takes longer. That testing time is very small compared to the overall costs of an update system and like I stated, that update system is in place anyway for normal software updates as it saves countless hours of manual vists.
That leads to why I am questioning your "savings". Our security costs would be almost exactly the same with 10 Windows machines or 1000 machines because the same automatted process is used. Without the automation system, doing 10 machines by hand would cost more then doing 1000 by automation. How did your security costs go down so much by reducing the number of Windows machines by 50% and introducing another OS? Were you doing them by personal visit to each machine? If so, have you looked at the savings involved with an automatted system that can also be used for upgrades and general software changes throughout the company? Does the other OS need security updates as well? I think your costs would go up because now you are repeating the same patching process for both OSs? If doing them by hand I could understand the savings if one OS has less patches then the other but again, I question the whole "by hand" concept which is a huge deficiency and time waster. From the sounds of it, I'd bet we spend far less time and money patching and updating our 1000 machines then you do patching your 50. Maybe YOU should be looking at some alternatives.
Say what you will. Anyone who blindly installs Windows systems without really looking at alternatives should get fired.
Say what you will, anyone that blindly posts improvement figures should be able to describe them or give some insight into those numbers or at least realize that claim of spectacular would be questioned.
Funny.
h tmlOpen Directorys .htmlWindows Services on OSXS
OS X Server is more than just SMB it's also LDAP, Kerberos, DHCP, and other protocols (withOUT proprietary extensions, of course). It can do group policies, user policies and machine policies. Network home directories for BOTH platforms as well.
Yes, you can rip out a PDC and replace it with an OS X Server. Been there, done that. You can't (yet) rip out an AD DC and fully replace it with OS X Server.
But I'd guess that you will be able to before 2007 is over.
Here's a little current information for you.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/opendirectory.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/windowsservice
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
What part of OSX Server provides AD GPO to a Windows domain?
Hardware RAID 5 is faster, I somehow doubt you want your enterprise server to be wasting it's clock cycles calculating CRC values for your array.
I would if it's faster. In any event, the overhead of "calculating CRCs" is so low on any modern hardware it's irrelevant.
There are many, many benchmarks showing that software RAID is faster than hardware RAID in most situations, on decent modern hardware. Not to mention reliability and long term support options are typically better as well.
Hardware RAID unquestionably buys you transparency (and in many cases, is worth it solely for that). It *may* buy you better performance, depending on the exact configuration and environment, but it's not a given.
> - Noton Utilities (if only it had the features of ver 3)
Why in holy freaking hades would you need Norton Utilities on a Mac? You need Norton Utilities on a Windows machine ONLY BECAUSE THE OS IS JUNK. Get an OS that's not broken and you don't need a "fixit" program.
Brett
Why isn't iWeb included in iWork? Most small corps want a web page creation tool and they might buy iWork but they aren't going to be buying iLife too.
With all new Macs being Intel native, the ability to run Windows flavors will only become more elegant, thus rendering this entire conversation irrelevent. The question this time next year might: "Should we invest in these 250 Dell PCs that only run Windows, or should we be safe and get the Macs that can run both?" I say this only because my tech coworkers at school who know little to nothing about Macs are already murmuring these sort of things. Tech savy people, even if they are 100% pc, still hear things in the industry. Being the geeks most of us are, they are going to at least look into the possibility. I had the most anti-Apple person on our staff over the other night to help me install Windows XP Professional, and he's already talking about getting a MacBook Pro.
in the 20 years that I have been doing IT I have never "upgraded" the video card on a corporate workstation.
"This message was sent from an Apple
If the software was well-written, it would be platform independent.
No, if the software was well-writte, it would be platform specific: it would integrate correctly with the desktop, follow all the UI conventions for the platform, etc. That means platform specific coding.
Now, for well-written applications, that shouldn't be a lot of work. But none of the cross-platform toolkits (Java, wxWidgets, Gnome, Qt, etc.) yield acceptable cross-platform behavior. Even Mozilla can only get away with its shitty platform integration because it works well on Windows and other platforms just have to live with it.
We no longer purchase apps that are of general interest to research unless they support at least Mac and Windows.
As well you should. Nevertheless, if the software is well-written, it's not "cross platform", it's effectively different apps for different platforms that share a lot of code.
Corporate clients *like* bland, beige boxes. They don't like tying themselves to a vendor. If Dell goes kookie, and starts insisting on putting high end graphics cards in every box, they can simply switch to another vendor with minimal hassle. Without the ability to migrate OS X between vendors, Apple is too high of a risk for any responsible corporation to use.
And that's on the desktop. Apple has no place in the server room. They bring nothing to the table that others don't do better, cheaper, and faster. The fact that they eat their own dog food doesn't mitigate this.
You missed the point entirely. I was "frothing at the mouth" over the "there's no dispute" part. If I dispute, then there's a dispute. Get it? No dispute, but I'm disputing ... oh forget it. It was +5 funny to me, but it's obviously -5 not funny to everyone else.
It's not common, but I've upgraded a few over the last few years. Mostly for autocad users, or the graphics department.
And the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Fair point, however it works perfectly satisfactorily for a green field site, Windows boxes integrate perfectly well into a Domain environment - and the majority of the AD stuff can be managed perfectly well using OD.
Now that you've called attention to the fact you asked a question [and I didn't answer because I never looked at this thread again and there was no email], I re-read beyond this point with a -1 threshold. Reading the posts which came after yours, particularly about centralized administration of Macs, pretty much bears out what we've also discovered. It's pretty good on the Mac side but don't take my word for it. I'd suggest reading the other posts which follow.
We did play with Netboot from one of the Xserves but our machines are too different to make that useful. It's hardly worth it for only five desktop machines we can call "identical". Each workstation is task specific and has a number of operators. We also have roaming profiles but it's a challenge for us as each user may or may not continue a job started by someone else on the same machine. Half of our systems aren't operator specific so we stick with univeral logins on the systems and user specific access on the file server.
I also re-read your post assuming you weren't trying to be a jerk and came away with a different take on what you're saying. I probably judged your statements too harshly because I had the Windoze fanboi filter turned on. It's a common thing on Slashdot for someone to say "hey, Macs actually work" and get trounced by a dozen Windows admins who don't believe it, even without any experience on the subject. The Windoze fanboi filter still comes on as I read and need to sudo kill -9 the instinct. I'll apologize to you for that here if that notion is accurate. I've learned to expect no less from Slashdot.
Of course, in certain environments, what you're doing and saying makes sense. Not in ours. Hell, we just got rid of 7 workstations stuck on NT4 and updated them to XP in August. They'll stay on XP but we can't put SP2 on them yet because the primary app will break. That's the kind of nonsense we have to deal with on isolated, select Windows workstations.
On the other hand, all of our Mac workstations run really well if you shove enough RAM in them and attach fast cache drives. The biggest problems we face on the Macs can usually be solved over the phone - which means it isn't broken.
Most of the stuff on