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Taking Heat: An Academic Administrator Fires Back About Mac |
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Written by Site Admin
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Thursday, 19 June 2008 |
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 Sometimes the title of a commentary can get you in more hot water than the actual content of what you write. Such was the case with my piece, "Six Reasons Why Mac OS/X is Ready for the Enterprise." Within hours of distribution the yeas and nays started flooding my inbox. Never mind the fact that I pretty much undermined my own argument by the end of the piece, at least one of my geek buddies nevertheless took exception right from the get-go. Near as I can figure it, her beef was really with the title of the piece, because at the very end of the article I state pretty unequivocally that although OS/X is a pretty good OS, Apple is not really providing it with enterprise-grade support or vision.
Let me see if I can do justice to what she wrote. Her arguments are all straight from the front-lines of system administration and help desk operations, so you ought to pay them heed. Where I differ with her is on one fairly tough-to-prove point, but for the most part I think she's made some exceptional arguments why the entire "Mac" platform (as opposed to OS/X on the desktop, which was the point of my piece) is just not ready for big-time roll-outs. Her first point was a bit esoteric, but important. The entire Apple approach to networking is still stuck in the old days of workgroup computing. One server, one workgroup. This is a fair beef... For the most part. It is true that the OS/X server software running on Apple hardware -- which is, after all, the only way you can get it -- isn't geared for true, large-scale, domain model roll-outs. In other words, where Microsoft, Novell, and even Linux long-ago created models for managing the security of thousands of computers spread across dozens of sub-domains, Apple has yet to come to the table with the same heft. You simply can't standardize on Apple servers without carving and slicing your systems into groups that may or may not be able to communicate with different servers in other groups without going to after-market solutions or some seriously gymnastic administrative magic. As far as it goes, her point has merit. |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 19 June 2008 )
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The OS Wars - Part III - Six Reasons Why Mac OS/X is Ready for the Enterprise |
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Written by Site Admin
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Friday, 13 June 2008 |
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Have you ever put your hands on a Mac? Go on, admit it. You, the head geek (read that: “CIO”) for your company, snuck into the local Apple store one night under the cover of darkness. You furtively glanced over your shoulder as you picked up the Macbook Air. It’s okay to admit it. You’re among friends. I’ve been there.
I walked into the Apple store once as it buzzed with college students, retro-hippies, and heavily-pierced skater dudes. I felt instantly out of place. I suddenly felt old. Really old. The iPhone I wore proudly on my belt belied my “wannabe” status. I couldn’t help but look around and feel that the alleged “geniuses” in their official Apple t-shirts all looked like they were struggling to escape high school. Some looked old enough to be staring down the barrel of doctorate degrees, but still had that, “I’m younger and cooler than you” sense about them.
And that’s the first hurdle enterprise decision makers must surmount when they think about the OS/X platform. The Apple store is the primary outlet for Apple computer hardware these days. Sure, you can get your gear via the Internet or the local Best Buy or the odd Apple certified retailer, but for most people their first hands-to-keyboard experience will take place in a retail-focused, consumer-friendly Apple store. It's just a little tough for the hard-core geek in me to take the Mac platform seriously when it is usually found sitting next to an docked iPod or iPhone and not a 3Tb Storage Area Network box running over iSCSI to a virtualized blade server. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 14 June 2008 )
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The OS Wars - Part II - Six Reasons Why Vista is Best for the Enterprise |
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Written by Site Admin
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Wednesday, 14 May 2008 |
Windows Vista takes a lot of heat for being big, bloated, slow, and buggy. As someone who just finished downgrading yet another machine from Vista to Windows XP, I can tell you from first-hand experience that the speed issue is a legitimate one. On average I see about a 15 to 20% improvement in performance on every machine I downgrade back to Windows XP. Yes, I still run Vista on about three of my machines, but they have beefy hardware with 800Mhz or higher memory bus speeds, 7200RPM drives with 8meg cache or more, and at least 128Meg of dedicated graphics memory on an add-in card, not a shared chipset. Oh, and let’s not forget the memory, the more the better. Every one of my Vista machines starts with 2gigs of RAM. Baseline. Don’t even try to boot without it.
But is being big and bloated enough of a reason not to consider Windows Vista from an “enterprise” perspective?
Come one, folks! At the risk of sounding flip or cavalier, isn’t it time we all get over the hardware requirements? I also dual boot Vista on my first generation Macbook Pro with a Dual Core Intel CPU. You know what? The performance isn’t bad. It’s not as snappy as OS/X on the same platform, but it’s not horrible, either. But the Macbook Pro when new cost $2400.00. It still has more horsepower than most of the sub-$1000 laptops hitting the market at the local Best-Buy or Staples and the graphics power alone is one of the reasons why Vista “feels” better on the Mac.
So once we get over the whole notion that Vista simply is more demanding on the underlying hardware, we get down to the more important question.
Does Vista make a compelling business case to choose it over other platforms, and that includes standing pat on Windows XP SP2? |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 16 May 2008 )
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