Why Consumer Macs Are Enterprise-Worthy

cyberkahn tips us to an article in Computerworld that makes the case for Apple's consumer machines moving into corporations. (The article dismisses Linux desktops in the enterprise in a single bullet item.) With the press that Vista has been getting, is Apple moving into a perfect storm? Quoting: "There is no comparison between Apple's 'consumer' machines and the consumer lines of its competitors. All of Apple's machines are ready to move into the enterprise, depending on the job at hand. The company's simple and elegant product line, which is also highly customizable, will be Apple's entree to the business market — if IT decision-makers can get over their prejudice against equipment that's traditionally been aimed at consumers."

Comments

Ever had 250+ consumer macs in the enterprise?

[dasOp]

Well I do. And the rate of failure is just terrible. Without exact numbers at hand, I can definitely say we've sent over 30 iBooks to the local Apple service partner.
Being an enterprise customer you definitely dont have to wait in line for consumer service, we just send the computers directly for service. Otoh, you definitely won't get 4hr onsite like all the major pc vendors offer.

As for group policy and manageability, Apple got in the game late and will definitely catch up. The question is when (and what decade).

from my experience

[t35t0r]

They are not. just from trying to get them configured for the uni ldap, autofs, nis, it's a pita. We have to manually make changes in the nfs script because it makes 1000's of symlinks in 2 different directories. Many of the settings that can be modified with nss_ldap don't even exist on osx, for example loginshell overrides. There's no newgrp, we have to roll our own. It's going to be real fun transferring all our users from nis to open directory (slapd) when we start configuring that. Will padl's migrationtools work, I doubt it.

OSX server comes with apache 1.3 ..wtf? we had to use fink and install 2.0.something (the apache2 monolithic build provided by serverlogistics.com has cgi bugs). The configuration files are all over the place /etc/hostconfig, /Library, /System/Library, netinfo gui while on more posix systems it's just /etc . The perl that also comes with osx is buggy (try installing Net::LDAP and all its prereqs using perl -MCPAN -e shell).

How do I login to an xserve with ssh -C -Y or ssh -X and run gvim or an xterm or any X app, can't have to use vnc. Then there's HFS which we have to use to support all those nasty meta files. I guess Xsan will be nice when we use it but that's after we get all the data off our huge raid array just for a couple of mac clients.

We haven't even started migrating postgres, mailman, request tracker, and sendmail yet. If it's anything like the way it has been already we're probably going to have to use fink again.

And no I don't want quicktime on my headless Xserve, thinking differently is difficulty.

Re:Who wrote this crap?

[TheMeuge]

[quote]1) Linux is not a desktop OS (if it has changed in the last couple of years perhaps I should take a second look)[/quote]

Really? Tell that to my parents. The learning curve was so "bad" that not only did they accept Linux nearly instantly, but it has now been almost a month, and I haven't heard a complaint, nor request for help.

Re:Who wrote this crap?

[be-fan]

My question is why would anybody run MacOS X as a UNIX distribution when there are other UNIXes out there that are a lot cheaper to buy, such as BSD, Solaris, and Linux.

That really wasn't the point of the original post. The original poster complained, in so many words, that OS X was isolationist and did everything its own way. That's wrong. Whenever possible, OS X does things how other modern *NIXs do things. Aside from Quartz, Cocoa, and Carbon, most everything in OS X is built off open technologies. OpenGL, LDAP, CUPS, NFS, SSH, etc are all part of the core platform.

Not to mention that running UNIX programs in OS X is more trouble at first as OS X doesn't natively use X11 and it will include none of the standard Qt or GTK libraries, X11, or GCC in a standard installation.

X11 and GCC are on every OS X installation CD. Yeah, it doesn't install them by default, but then again, Ubuntu doesn't install GCC by default either!

I bet that any CIO worth their Mountain Dew ration will feel the same way.

Again, we're not talking about buying OS X to get a UNIX, but buying OS X and getting a UNIX as part of the bargain. You don't need to have OS X to get a machine that uses UNIX standards, but if you do buy OS X machines, they can integrate into your environment much like any other UNIX.

Oh, and Linux does not necessarily have its own disk format like Solaris, OS X, or Windows do. Linux will install on ext2, ext3, ReiserFS 3, XFS, and JFS.

Of those, only XFS and JFS weren't especially designed for Linux. And it took several years to port XFS to Linux, reinforcing my point that filesystems are by and large closely tied to their host OS. Also, ext3 is the de-facto standard Linux filesystem. Every major distribution ships ext3 as the default, and its the first one to get improvements like the low-latency work and fine-grained locking.

And to be fair, OS X installs on UFS just fine, though some apps don't like the case-sensitivity.

And with the exception of ReiserFS and ext4, all of the Linux filesystems are fully read-write in at least one other OS. For example, Windows can read-write ext2 and ext3 via the IFS driver.

And both Linux and Windows can read-write HFS+. However, Windows won't install on ext2 or UFS, Linux won't install on NTFS, UFS, or HFS+, so why is it a surprise that OS X won't install on NTFS or ext3? The original poster asked "why does OS X use its own disk format", and the answer is: "almost every OS uses its own, preferred disk format". There are exceptions, and Linux is particularly flexible in this regard, but even on Linux there is a de-facto standard that is the most well-supported.