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April 19, 1999

TechView:
Mac OS X Strives For Unity

By Jason Levitt

acOS X Server, Apple's latest server operating system, may or may not win over some enterprise clients, but it has the potential to give the company's confused server strategy some much-needed clarity. With Appleshare, Netinfo, NFS, and the usual Internet server technologies all bundled together for $499, MacOS X Server is the closest Apple has come to unifying its server offerings on a scalable platform that offers developers and system administrators some deployment flexibility.

MacOS X Server--the X is a Roman numeral 10--is, for all practical purposes, Unix, an operating system Apple has flirted with for years. Apple's A/UX, introduced in the early 1990s, was essentially Unix System V Release 2 with Berkeley 4.3 enhancements. But it really didn't offer much to mainstream Apple users except poor performance. More recently, IBM's AIX running on Apple's Network Server (mirror.apple.com/server) has been an alternative high-performance Appleshare server. Apple is also porting Linux to its hardware (www.mklinux.apple.com), and there's even MachTen, a third-party version of Unix that runs on the Mac (www.tenon.com).

The acquisition of Next Computer gave Apple a starting point for MacOS X Server, since Next's OpenStep was already a server platform and included WebObjects, a set of classy Web development tools. When Apple finishes migrating Appleshare IP Server to MacOS X Server, it will have a single integrated server platform. By moving Appleshare IP Server's POP and IMAP mail servers, DNS server, and the PC-compatible SMB file-sharing to MacOS X Server and cleaning up the administrative GUI, Apple could have an operating system that's more appealing to IS managers as a multiprotocol server platform. More companies would probably switch to MacOS X Server if it ran on some of their non-G3 Power Macintoshes. Rumor has it that it does already, but Apple isn't supporting any machines except the G3s.

Apple has to provide its OpenStep customers with a desktop operating system, so MacOS X will be released in a desktop version by the end of the year. But other than running OpenStep applications, I can't see any compelling reasons for MacOS 8.x users to migrate to MacOS X on the desktop. I doubt Apple can either, since it plans to support MacOS 8.x and its future versions for the foreseeable future.

MacOS 8.x on the desktop and MacOS X Server in the back office may not be the best solution, but if Apple does offer a single, integrated server platform, that will make it easier for IT system administrators to deploy MacOS X Server in the enterprise.