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

B

buu

Registered
So I'm the only guy at my work who likes Mac. I'm a network administrator in a global Active Directory, fully Microsoft environment.

My boss is also a fan of Macs. Yesterday he gave me the green light to order 17" Powerbooks for him and myself and an Xserve.

I am presented with the task of figuring out how I can make the Xserve worth while in our environment. Now I realize this is a pretty broad question but can anyone offer suggestions of things I can do to show all the other guys that this Xserve can be useful to us? If I can do this, we'll be seeing a lot more of then in our data center :D

As well, I'm only a Mac end user with no experience on Xserve. What kind of learning should I seek to get into the nitty gritty details of sys/net admin when it comes to Mac?

Thank you kindly, in advance

Buu
 
What type of work do you do? How many staff and what are your requirements? I'd assume you probably already have covered the basics like email, web, file servers and so on, but there's always something that a business needs.

Often, if you just casually ask around, you'll find there are a lot of people who are working on stuff ... databases, wikis, documentation systems, new web services like blogs or RSS, videos, radio ads and presentations. Find out what people actually want first, then see how you can go about getting it for them. Just looking around my office, I know of one person who wants a VNC remote takeover facility, another who is begging for a push towards VOIP, another who wants a new wiki system, and so on.

Also, don't forget anti-spam and anti-virus functions. If your workplace is small enough that that management all saw "that new XServe thing" arrive, and then all their spam and virus worries start to disappear, they'll be happy to fund the push further. Also, and I hate to say this, you need to focus first on what management need, and then work down towards services for day-to-day business ... if you build a system that does great things for day-to-day business but doesn't offer managers any real advantage, they aren't going to splash out for another server in a couple of years time.

Best of luck, and keep us posted.
 
Having an XServe as a server will not stop your Windows client machines from getting viruses or spam. The server will be unaffected, but malicious attachments and what-not will still be passed on to the client machines.

I know this goes against what people recommend here, but depending on the type of work you do, a Macintosh server and Macintosh client machines may not be the way to go. It may be more productive and beneficial to stick with an all-Windows environment.

What kind of work do you want the XServe to do? What do you intend to do with the PowerBooks?

I work in an environment where we do a lot of database, FoxPro and web programming with FoxPro -- a Macintosh computer would not be conducive in this environment, since the XServe couldn't run our FoxPro server nor could it handle our ASP pages as well as our Windows server could.

In some cases, being a Macintosh fanatic and wanting to bring Mac computers into the network just isn't feasible... if you can elaborate on the kinds of things you expect our of your server machines and your client machines, we can make a much better recommendation.
 
Having an XServe as a server will not stop your Windows client machines from getting viruses or spam. The server will be unaffected, but malicious attachments and what-not will still be passed on to the client machines.
Click to expand...

I know. What I was suggesting was that Buu may want to run the XServe as a virus-scanner/spam-assassin/firewall machine. Just an option to look at.
 
Thanks for the links!

Some good suggestions although a lot of those ideas are already established and owned by other parts our IT groups (we have about 25 people in our IT staff).

There really was no purpose for buying this stuff. It's just for me to play with and see if I can do anything with it. If the Xserve can actually serve a purpose, we could buy more! If not, no big deal and I'll still have it to play with.
 
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?
 
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.
 
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! :)
 
Natobasso said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Lt Major Burns said:
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
Go3iverson said:
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! :)
Click to expand...

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
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top