Mac OS X Gains Enterprise IT Attention

Computerworld - The bad news for Macintosh supporters is that the IT jury is still out on how Mac OS X fits into the enterprise. The good news is that at least some IT managers are deliberating with open minds.
C.J. Rayhill, CIO at Sebastopol, Calif.-based publisher O'Reilly & Associates Inc., manages 300 PCs. The operating systems in use are about equally split between Linux, Mac OS and Windows, but that could change soon. "We're looking at a wholesale changeover of our desktop systems by the end of 2003," Rayhill says.
Should Rayhill decide to consolidate onto one operating system, Mac OS X running on systems from Apple Computer Inc. is the leading candidate. She cites strong user preference within O'Reilly's IT department, noting that Mac OS X, which is based on BSD Unix and the Mach kernel, is displacing Linux as the platform of choice among developers.
Apple's new rack-mount Xserve servers, which run OS X, also appeal to O'Reilly's systems administrators. And with OS X being the only non-Windows operating system to run Microsoft Office natively, Rayhill says having a single desktop standard is possible up and down the enterprise.
Rayhill and many other IT managers give Apple credit for what it has done to improve Unix. "A good part of Mac OS X's appeal to me is that having a disciplined interface makes work so much easier," says John Welch, information systems manager for the MIT Police Department in Cambridge, Mass. For example, he says, other Unix graphical user interfaces (GUI) have different ways to kill a job. But with OS X, it's always the same for any application.
"I've run every Unix GUI that's ever shipped - for about 30 minutes. I hate them all," says Chuck Goolsbee, vice president of technical operations at Digital Forest Inc., a Bothell, Wash.-based application service provider with 400 Macintosh servers in its data center. His conclusion: "Apple has done a great job with the GUI."
Welch, who is testing Mac OS X as a network domain controller, says a systems administrator can configure a server a half-hour faster using the Mac OS X GUI than he could using a Unix server. And he predicts that technical support for end users running Mac OS X will decrease because the underlying Unix core is inherently more stable.
Solid Foundation
The Mac OS X's stability has already proved itself to Dale Sorenson, president of Sorenson Services USA in New York. The streaming-media consultancy recently finished an 80-hour project for a client using advanced media encoding