So I have to lead the Mac revolution at my work...

[Natobasso]

Make sure you get a pro level firewall and back up for your tiger server.

At my work we lost our server twice due to an incompatibility with Retrospect and our highspeed firewire back up drive.

As much as I love macs, apple still has a ways to go before it compares in the server arena to pcs as far as general compatibility and stability.

[Go3iverson]

Some info on your exact environment would be helpful, such as what type of clients you have and what it is that you do.

There's tons of uses for an Xserve. Computational clustering, file sharing, web serving, etc. I'm assuming, if you have AD that you have Exchange to go with it. One of my favorites is backup. You can use Xserve and Xserve RAID to backup Macintosh and Windows servers and clients, as well as applications, such as Exchange. Leverage a virus free backup environment as well as exceptionally affordable, fast storage that will fit the purpose exceptionally well.

I have a whitepaper on these solutions on my site, http://www.district13computing.com/docs/Backup3.pdf , which is also republished on AFP548.com, MacEnterprise.org and a handful of other sites. Its a great way to start using Apple Server and Storage solutions, especially if you want to start exploring more purposes for it in your environment.

Really, though, more details!

[Go3iverson]

Make sure you get a pro level firewall and back up for your tiger server.

At my work we lost our server twice due to an incompatibility with Retrospect and our highspeed firewire back up drive.

As much as I love macs, apple still has a ways to go before it compares in the server arena to pcs as far as general compatibility and stability.

I do large scale deployments and consulting full time and I don't usually hear of stability issues, when things have been properly tuned and setup. Retrospect really wouldn't be close to my first choice in backup solutions, unless you have a very small environment. Every site I go to that has Retrospect always has some aggravation with the product, but it has its places.

[buu]

next time you are planning spending that much money without a real purpose can i have a powerbook too? or just your spending budget? please?

Our dept's CapEx for next year is getting cut down to nothing so our VP spent the last quarter trying to buy as much as we could with our 2005 budget.

[buu]

Some info on your exact environment would be helpful, such as what type of clients you have and what it is that you do.

There's tons of uses for an Xserve. Computational clustering, file sharing, web serving, etc. I'm assuming, if you have AD that you have Exchange to go with it. One of my favorites is backup. You can use Xserve and Xserve RAID to backup Macintosh and Windows servers and clients, as well as applications, such as Exchange. Leverage a virus free backup environment as well as exceptionally affordable, fast storage that will fit the purpose exceptionally well.

I have a whitepaper on these solutions on my site, http://www.district13computing.com/docs/Backup3.pdf , which is also republished on AFP548.com, MacEnterprise.org and a handful of other sites. Its a great way to start using Apple Server and Storage solutions, especially if you want to start exploring more purposes for it in your environment.

Really, though, more details!

Thanks for the info I'll check it out.

As far as our environment, I'll try to sum it up as best I can.

I work for a large gold mining company. We have 13,000 employees and around 25 locations world wide (that # is incl mines and regional offices). Here in Vancouver is our head office and we've been working over the last couple years (I've only joined 1 year ago) to centralize IT management. We have over 25 people in our IT dept... maybe 30 or 35 now that I think about it and incl management. We have a newly built data center which houses about 80+ servers, which are 99% Windows and it's growing daily. We have AD and run Domino globally. We're piloting Exchange and will most likely move to it within the next two years, world-wide along with the full stack of MS products, such as SharePoint etc. We're also in the middle of an SAP initiative (which has been an absolute hog of a project).

I say I'm a network administrator but as we know that can be a fairly broad job title these days, since in small companies, a net admin is the entire IT dept. I work under a Network Architect who leads our global initiatives and I do a lot of network infrastructure support and projects. We are a 95% Cisco shop so I'm generally playing with that gear all day, although I do have a lot of system admin tasks too. However, email, AD, Help Desk, SAP, etc are all split into their own little groups with "teams" working on each piece (with people crossed over here and there). Getting the Mac to serve some sort of purpose to me Cisco wise would be cool or anything else worthwhile is fine. It would just be cool to show the other guys Mac's aren't useless.

Backups are already taken care of and will be for years (I just saw our 5 year pre-buy purchase of licenses... $$$!). Email/spam/anti-virus are already developed. We JUST got a new SAN which still isn't in production quite yet.

Not sure what other info is good for you guys. I really do appreciate the suggestions, though. I'm often free to chat too - buulam@hotmail.com

Cheers
Buu