Apple shouldn't even bother with OSX Server, or Xserve anymore. They've hung their hat on being a trendsetting consumer electronics company. The day might very well come when Macs aren't even their primary focus.
It's a shame. They pissed away the education market, and that was their ticket into the enterprise. In the mid 90's, they had a really nice departmental server, but they never pushed it hard enough. Worse, it ran licensed copies of IBM's AIX, when all along, Apple had their own excellent version of Unix called AUX (that has since become legendary). AUX was notable in that it was a scalable, rock-solid descendant of AT&T's Unix, but had a classic Mac OS interface and ran Mac OS software as well as Unix software. Apple just never pushed it very hard, and charged a far too high price for it when they
were selling it. I've long said that had they chucked the Copland project and simply made AUX their operating system, they might not have even needed Steve Jobs to return. As it is, monolithic Unix kernels such as the one AUX had are superior to the Mach-based Microkernel that OSX uses (sorry, I love OSX, but Mach always has, and always will lag in performance compared to monolithic kernels). What Apple should have done was replace the Mac OS interface on AUX, and put Aqua on there instead. Viola, a highly usable operating system that could scale as well as Solaris in the enterprise.
You can read about AUX at
this website, with screenshots and the backstory behind AUX, the OS that
should have been the future of the Mac.
One thing that confuses me about this is, who the heck needs a GUI OS on a server? Seems pretty wasteful of resources to me. When we roll out new Unix servers (mostly RedHat these days, though we still use quite a bit of Solaris), they don’t have any X installed beyond what is necessary to be able to export a display to a remote host.
"I definitely say Apple's enterprise support is lacking compared to someone like Sun, which is very good," said Andrew Oliver, director of operations at LiveWorld Inc., a provider of Web conferencing services for companies including Intel Corp., BEA Systems Inc., Campbell Soup Co. and eBay Inc. LiveWorld has an Apple data center deployment of about 120 Xserve dual-processor systems.
Luckily, Sun is a much better value than the Macs, so Andy O can just keep getting those instead. /sarc
