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Inside Apple's Leopard Server OS
An anonymous reader writes "Mac expert John Welch, author of the widely read OS X versus Vista comparison, delves into Apple's Leopard Server OS. He and Information week have on offer a deep dive into what's known so far about OS X Server 10.5, which will be showcased at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Welch weighs in on Leopard's iCal, Wiki, file, Quicktime, and mail services, along with Xgrid 2, Open Directory 4, and 64-bit capabilities. What does it all add up to? His assessment: Apple probably isn't aiming at 'big' enterprises; just the same, Leopard Server is shaping up to be a great SMB (small and mid-sized business) product. Welch writes: 'For about a thousand bucks on existing hardware, or for the cost of an Xserve, you get a really solid server, able to support Web services, collaboration, groupware, IM, and file services. You can run it with its own directory service, or as part of an Active Directory implementation out of the box. It provides some features that due to pricing and/or setup requirements, have traditionally been reserved for big enterprises — in particular clustering of both email and calendaring servers.'"
A comparison between Leopard Server and Linux would've been better, IMHO.
Tell me how fast it copies files...
Thanks
--Bill G.
The one thing that has really helped MS in the enterprise has been that the sell an entire solution that all works together. Windows desktops sign into Windows Active Directory run by Windows Servers. Outlook connects to Exchange running on Windows servers with Kerberos AD logins. Office and Sharepoint getting along to create and maintain intranet content.
Apple has made huge inroads with solving the desktop issues of running Unix on the desktop. For the most part though I have seen either Linux or MS solutions on the server for file sharing and web serving and NIS/NFS and such. Even on the mac I would imagine that Entourage connecting to an Exchange server makes up a large portion of the Enterprise mail community.
If Apple can provide a cheaper end-to-end solution from the server to the desktop with LDAP directories, email, calendering, intranet etc - all preloaded on their server hardware and ready to go - then they have a real winner. Hell the cheaper licencing costs they can offer from basing on open-source can help subsidize their higher hardware margins to make this a comparable, if not cheaper, solution compared to something MS from the likes of Dell or HP.
If they really wanted to twist the knife in they should release some client software/drivers for Windows that make it just as easy to connect that to their servers and services as Macs to accomodate the need for having some PCs in a newly mac office.
Now is the time to do this as companies are faced with upgrading to Vista on the desktop, a new version of Office, and soon a new server platform. Most of this means new hardware purchases anyway. They might be able to just swoop in and offer a complete solution the likes of which linux has been unable to - all bundled with and guaranteed/supported on their own hardare as well.
The Windows guy ain't delivering.
He's not Dilbert, he's Wally. Look at Vista... it's got a few improvements, but most of what's new in Vista is the business it's running out of its cubicle selling music and movies for the entertainment industry.
The Mac guy, maybe he's the guy in sales with executive hair, but luckily there's a better choice for the server room.
The employees you really want are in the Tron suit and devil costume.
Okay here's my comparison.
If you are going to have anything less than 20 computers, and you actually have a bussiness in which time is valuable and you don't have IT-class people with time on their hands, then Linux is insanley expensive to maintain. Get the apple even if the cost per node is higher.
Okay now you say you have 50 to 100 nodes. most of these are behind a cluster router so don't have to be locked down. They all don't have to be running services or what they do run is identical. Well then get Linux. There's zero need to get the apple cost per node. And to boot they will probably reun just a tad faster since you can strip out all those services you don't need. At 100 nodes, having a machine run 10% faster is like 10 extra nodes, so it's worth the optimization at that level of use.
People who claim different, must consider their time has no value, the risk to their bussniess from uncertainty about the patch level of their system has no value, or they have free access to high level sys admin.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I manage the modest network of a facility with 900 Macs and 120 WinPcs, 1800 users, 3 mail servers, 2 webservers, etc. All servers except one anti-virus server and one Linux mail server, are Mac Xserve running Tiger 10.4 server. All the computers are in a single OpenDirectory domain with all users, including Windows users, authenticating off OpenDirectory. All have roaming home directories which users can access from Macs or PC, managed printer and workstation access... The fact is, we use OS=X server because we have easier fine grain control over desktop applications and resource acces than we do from Windows servers. We find the Mac servers very adequate for our needs. The management software is superb and much more logical than Server 2003 and older and far more coherent and centralized than I have seen so far Linux or BSD
It takes one full time person to run the network and maintain the network and computers, largely due to Apple's remote desktop and net boot reimaging services and the fact that all the Macs can run off two install images: one for Intel, one for PPC. The WinPCs take roughly twice the maintenance time per cpu than the Macs largely be cause of differing drivers.
Oh.. The facility is a public k-12 school. Mac server are also very common in colleges, law offices, large and medium printing companies, greeting card companies, scientific research, and newspapers.
I think that there is a very flawed perception in your argument. You are correct that Apple does not reveal "everything" about new products before unveiling, and with some products (especially new ones) they are absolutely secretive.
But I think it is a common mistake in industry to think that you can do better planning based on the information from any vendor other than Apple (in the Steve Jobs Era). If you take Windows Vista vs. 10.5 as an example:
Microsoft has been touting features of Vista for years now, but if you take a look at the list of those features, and the ones that businesses were planning on building on, you would have been completely mislead as recently as 9 months ago. WinFS (database based file system) was arguably the killer feature that everyone was planning on. And we don't know when and if that will be delivered. And if you are really one of those planners who needs to know the future, then you would know that this feature was originally on the plan for Cario, which was Windows 95.
So Microsoft has been giving out information all along, but you can't rely on that information at all. Sure they have had a beta program going for quite some time... but we are talking about long-term planning here. The people who make those plans do not have time or inclination to play with those betas.
Now Apple on the other hand: I was at WWDC last year, and so got to see a lot of the new API's that Apple was working on, and I got to see a lot of the demonstrations of technologies that will be in 10.5. There are a whole number of technical-level details that Apple gave out, the type of things that are very important for programmers, and systems integrators. I got a great idea of how 10.5 will fit into my employer's network (even better than 10.4).
I didn't get to see the wiz-bang super-secret features that are still secrets, but to be honest, those aren't things I have to plan for until 9 months after 10.5 comes out anyways. The things I need to know to do my planning or programming Apple has made available to me (granted not for free), and the stuff that it would be cool to know, but I don't need to know to get my job done they still have behind the curtain.
And the stuff I saw I know will make it into 10.5 (unless the specifically told me it was on the bubble). Apple has a great track record with that. The stuff they didn't know if they could pull off correctly was excluded from public view. In my mind that helps me make the right decisions, rather than lead me to false expectations.
If they get ZFS working, as is the rumour, and it's not buggy, then I think they may have a killer feature on their hands.
Even Microsoft shops might be inclined to test this out for a NAS box. One of the big reasons why people by netapp boxes is for the snapshot and snapmirror capabilities. With ZFS, OSX would have very similar capabilities for a lot less $$.
And what's wrong with an XServe in the SMB space? RAID'd disks, or use the XServe RAID (or any other disk cabinet) externally, redundant power, space and power efficient design. If you need something to live with the office, then a MacPro, comparable in price to a PC of the same class, does the same job at the cost of more physical space. I've run academic sites that would qualify as small business computing (15 to 50 users, central storage and print, independent desktops running common environment), and we would have considered $3500 for the base machine, plus another $3500 for disks and a tape backup quite acceptable. I built a few of those machines, and after fighting the heat and support issues, bought the $3500 machines from HP and IBM which are still in service, years after I've departed. When i talked to the group, they haven't had a service call in on them yet, either, just like after being run hard for three years (I do HPC, so most of the machines run 24/7 doing heavy floating point and thrashing the disks with several gig scratch files) I haven't made a call on any of my XServes.
I and others have said this before; real businesses buy real hardware with real service contracts, because their data is worth more than the marginal cost of the cheapest machine they can find at NewEgg. The price difference between the $1500 machine that you're demanding, and the existing $2500 machine that they sell, is minimal, and can be written off on taxes.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
So it's not running in "big" enterprises. Then, in all seriousness, where is it running these days?
Well, are "big" enterprises all that exist? The answer should be hopefully obvious.
For our part, which is that of a large public research university, we have probably about 100 Mac OS X Server systems on campus here, and about 35 in our primary datacenter, not counting systems in compute clusters, which probably adds another 100 or so. (We have about 16000 Macs in general on campus, nearly all on Mac OS X.) Most are used for tasks where an Apple server is required or desired, like AppleShare file service, QuickTime Streaming Server, managing Mac OS X clients, etc. And yes, things like AFP and QTSS can be done on other platforms in various ways, but sometimes you want a seamless commercial-vendor-supported solution. The remainder are used as light to medium duty departmental/workgroup UNIX servers. In the latter case, they're usually picked because they're a lot easier for some folks to run than Windows Server 2003 or Linux; it's sometimes the difference between a small department or workgroup actually being able to reasonably run a server, or not. Some are deployed in departments with many skilled sysadmins who manage hundreds of Mac OS X clients, and use Mac OS X Server-specific functionality to do so.
You are absolutely right, in a perfect world, that is. A friend of mine constantly fights with his customers for this very reason. They buy cheap hardware and expect him to make it work, he could simply refuse to do so, but he has to eat, you know. The latest case had even me wondering, though. A medium-sized business wasn't willing to pay for an Xserve, but went with a Mac Pro instead. They are located in an area with exceptionally bad powerlines (If I would work there, I would refuse from connecting a desklamp without an UPS, that bad, really), the didn't want buy another UPS, so the Mac Pro runs unprotected, dies from time to time or mangles up the cyrus database. Guess who gets blamed?
Again, you are perfectly right, in theory. Educating customers shopping at NewEgg and the like for hardware to be used professionally puts a heavy burden on every consultant.
my 2 cents
I will admit that Apple doesn't have the Enterprise level support that Microsoft has. However, in every company I worked for, that Enterprise support did nothing for us. Whenever we actually had an issue (servers randomly crashing, web servers that don't respond to HTTP requests), our admins eventually found the solutions themselves online after days of frustrating tech calls to MS. They were there when we called them, but they were of little help to us.
Which one is the guy that is always 2 years late and when he finally delivers, the product does not live up to the original promises? As far as I know most companies (MS included) have marketing departments that oversell/overpromise. Dilbert is funny because that situation is more true that naught.
Most IT departments are conservative. They have to be. That's why Vista is not likely to be adopted by large companies until at least SP1. I would think that these departments would prefer the Mac if a Mac fits their needs. For most IT departments, it is about the right tool for the job. Need an Exchange server? Don't get a Mac. Need a file and print server? Windows, Linux, or Mac depending on your environment. With a Mac, they get a server (based on Unix) that fits into their environment fairly well with a minimum amount of support required and reasonable licensing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Without full support for exchange, this is a wanna-be server. The exchange, outlook integration is still way better than the ical approach. With exchange shared adressess books, shared calendars and really good email integration works. The apple server "sort of" supports imap and pop... and a couple of poor open-source web integration alternatives.
Exchange alone is a good enough reason to go with Windows servers (and yes, I know some people have difficulty setting up exchange.)
Lego Star Wars: the number one benchmark for enterprise-ready servers!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Sounds fairly similar to my internship at Central Washington University. There was one full-time Mac guy for all 700-800 Macs on campus. A couple others would poke at them, but they'd toss anything more than a simple problem to the Mac guy. There were about 2100 PCs on campus...and eight guys to cover all of those. Do the math.
And you're right on in saying that OS X Server is so much more intuitive in it's design that 2k3. I had taken several classes in 2k3, but had never touched OS X Server when I first installed it on a test machine. I was absolutly amazed at how much EASIER it was to setup and maintain that 2003. There's no comparison. Microsoft just loves to spread shit all over the system so that you have to know it backward and forward to get anything done and wind up opening five windows/applications. Apple put 90% of everything within two applications. Server Admin for services, Workgroup Manager for Open Directory Management. Then there are a few more little apps for managing other miscellaneous things. If only Microsoft could design something that simple, but they've proven time and time again that they're utterly incapable of it.
I work in a company where the infrastructure is primarily Win but the CEO is a Mac user since 1984. So there is always a push for interoperability at the least. MSFT apps do not play well with non-windows machines. Even web-based apps which should work on any web browser are crippled because of some Active X control or other crap. I'm talking about the newest versions of all MS products also, including SQL 2005, Reporting Services 2005, Dynamics CRM and GP, Sharepoint 2007, etc.
;)
Apple could kill MSFT with the following package:
A few DVD set with preconfigured (and designed) replacements for:
SQL to run everything on
OpenDirectory to authenticate everyone
Mail/Calendar/Task server ala exchange (with rules and distribution lists pulling from OpenDirectory)
CRM (with single sign on capability from directory)
Accounting (with SSO)
Enterprise reporting with charts, graphs, etc. that actually look good
Decent office programs (ala word, excel, PPT, outlook etc. DEPLOYABLE to desktops)
Office server program for collaboration, workflows and file sharing (Ala Sharepoint 2007 with SSO and integrate seamlessly with office programs)
Web forms server for forms
Decent analytics software
Enterprise antivirus
Backup solution
The number one thing is Single Sign On to all of this with one Kerberos login. This has been possible for about 30 years, yet it never seems to get done.
Anyway, a seamless install of all this, in one set, for one price, all interoperating, with a cohesive style all the way across the board (LOOKING *GOOD*, like Apple can).
Oh, and make sure that you can use Windows browsers to access the web-based content (support Firefox at least
With this package you could easily replace everything in my company that runs on Windows, and probably most companies. A lot of this is possible with open source stuff. They (Apple) would of course have to co-opt the open source crap and run it past their designers to make it actually look good. Run a few billion bucks worth of refining. Sorry to say this but I have yet to see a decently designed (for the people) open source app (and I know it's not usually the goal so foo), but with a few bil and Apple's staff and connections it might be possible.
Anyway, sell this package for $699 a seat and you will still come in well under MSFT!
Cool! Amazing Toys.