I just read a good article on TechRepublic that acts as a primer for the MacIntosh line of desktops, laptops and servers from Apple. In my past experience any Macs used in the corporate arena were primarily reserved for those personnel in Graphics departments who needed to perform advanced design work or multimedia editing.
I've seen the great television ads portraying the hip Mac and stodgy Windows computers and think it's great marketing. I understand that Macs are becoming increasingly popular as a home computer and a favorite among students, but am curious to learn if they have gained more of a foothold in the enterprise now that the Mac OS X operating system is an "open" UNIX-based operating system and shifted from the PowerPC chipset to Intel-based Macs.
The release of version 10.5 (Leopard) is slated for October of this year and now that my curiosity has been piqued, I'll pay a bit more attention to this solution. The majority of my experience has been with Intel/Windows and SPARC/Solaris based platforms, although I admit seeing and actually touching an Xserve server with its Xserve RAID storage unit once. So fess up. Are you currently using a Mac at home or in the workplace? If so, I'd value your feedback. Can Apple worm its way into the enterprise?
My coworkers and I are using MacBook Pros to perform our sysadmin duties. We operate a mixed environment of Windows/Mac/Linux servers and also do all network admin. We've been pretty happy and haven't run into major snags with the Mac. The amount of Open Source stuff for the platform is staggering, and we can lean on both the Mac and Linux/BSD communities for support.
Windows admin is easy with RDP, although I've tried the RDP 2.0 beta and the screen resizing problems have me back to using v1.0. I'll wait and try 2.0 when the final build is released.
We just picked up some XServes and XRAIDs to replace some problematic SNAP (NAS) servers. Still in the learning phase and no lessons yet.
Two of the Mac bugaboos are relatively minor. I'm a command line junkie, and the HOME and END keys don't do the same thing on a Mac that they do on a Windows or Linux machine. In fact, their behaviour is inconsistant from application to application. The second issue, mentioned by other bloggers & podcasters, is the poor photo thumbnail functionality. In the Finder (file explorer), you can only view one thumbnail at a time. To view a photoset, you have to import them all into iPhoto.
Dave
Posted by: Dave Cohoe | August 20, 2007 10:08 AM | Permalink to Comment