On Dec 23, 2011, at 1:19 PM, Scott Lewis wrote:

> On Dec 23, 2011, at 3:07 PM, Chris Murphy <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> OK I got that wrong. However, what's the relevance and importance of it 
>> being UNIX? Consistency and portability of user space processes? That would 
>> seem to be important in enterprise, but that's not the only thing important 
>> to enterprise. I listed a number of items that are considered extremely 
>> important to critical for enterprise, and none of that is even possible on 
>> Mac OS X. So it seems the UNIX certification usefulness is substantially 
>> dilluted.
> 
> I hate to break it to you.... Apple isn't an enterprise company, doesn't 
> really want servers, and isn't looking to break into the corporate 
> datacenter. They are quite happy without meeting your enterprise needs. 

Absolutely, no doubt, and crystal clear. But there is fall out, as a result of 
this, for Apple's past, present, and future customers. The biggest single 
fallout is trust. I increasingly do not trust Apple on the desktop. Not just 
enterprise, but in general. Here is why.

Example 1: XSan is actually a very cool. But because Apple is out of 
enterprise, do I trust that Xsan will be in 10.8? No. I don't. Because Apple 
has a track record of doing exactly what this thread primarily is complaining 
about which is technology abandonment, leaving users with major hardware, 
workflow and time investments that get dumped with no clear migration. 
Implementing XSan now is risky because of this. Enterprise almost certainly 
would not risk it, so why should a company with a 2-6 hd video studio invest? 
The very question being asked here isn't the merit of XSan, vs another 
solution, which is what it should be. The question is trusting Apple.

Example 2: After giving the cold shoulder to design and print markets, Apple 
went after photographers. Photographers unwittingly have enterprise level 
storage requirements. But they do not have enterprise storage budgets, nor are 
they enterprise class in most any other way. Average prosumer photographers 
will have storage in up to the 4TB realm, much of which is on multiple HDDs.  
More serious professionals are typically in the 20-30TB range, for one shooting 
photographer. Such storage requirements, if they were emails, documents, 
spreadsheets, presentations, would represent a company on the small side of 100 
employees, up to maybe 1000 employees.

Yet neither a linux hobbyist nor an enterprise business using EL has to contend 
with a substantive lack of logical volume management that photographers have to 
put up with on Mac OS X. Or a substantive lack of file system resilience. Truly 
incredibly inappropriate primary data storage is common place for Mac OS users 
who have storage needs beyond a single disk because of this.

Chris Murphy
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