Architosh Staff ([email protected])

3 June 2005

 

Apple Garners Strong, Favorable Views in Enterprise Press

Apple's Tiger OS Merits Well, Workstation Potential On the Horizon

The once Wall Street darling of GUI computers -- and current Wall Street darling of digital music -- is garnering much positive press in the enterprise and general IT arena. Here's a recap on some of the positive views being expressed about Apple's products and solutions. Mind you, five to seven years ago getting some of these publications to even write an article about the Mac -- much less a favorable one -- was like pulling teeth from a giant.

Xsan in the Enterprise

John Welch of Datamation online has written a fairly favorable article on Apple's Xsan, its first SAN (storage area network) product offering. Noting that Xsan and StorNext in combination is the only SAN product combo that allows Mac OS X machines to fully participate with Windows, Linux and UNIX machines, John also adds that Apple has made the cost very attractive by charging just $999 per machine. By contrast, per seat licensing for StorNext for Windows and Linux can run in the $3,000 - $4,000 price range.

John writes that if you are running a video server farm then running Apple Xsan/StorNext "is a no-brainer". To read the full article go here.

Tiger Earns its Stripes

eWeek has written a good review of Apple's Tiger OS (Mac OS X 10.4). Saying that Tiger is a "great upgrade for existing Macintosh installations" is one thing, but eWeek also says that the OS "merits strong consideration from non-Mac shops as well".

eWeek writes that new features in Tiger such as Spotlight and Automator offer individual "users the means to take more control of their work spaces and applications." "On the server side, Tiger offers a comprehensive set of network services, matching or beating what you can get from most Linux distributions or from Microsoft Corporation's Windows Small Business Server 2003." To read the full article go here.

Power-Hungry Animation 3D Artists - Take Note

PC Magazine has written a good review of Apple's latest Power Mac G5 workstations (or are they personal computers?). Calling them "Very Good", the magazine says the machines are not just quiet and contain up-to-date graphics performance, but are easy to work in and powerful.

Saying that the "Power Mac G5 Dual has been, and is still, the one system that graphics artists dream of when they take their catnaps between editing sessions", PC Magazine tested the high-end dual 2.7 G5 system against the fastest PC Windows boxes and found very good results.

PC Magazine said the dual 2.7 G5 Power Mac was just 1-2 seconds slower than a dual-core Intel Pentium Extreme Edition (840) machine and dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ machine running Adobe Photoshop in two filter tests. However, the dual 2.7 Power Mac G5 bested both machines with MAXON's Cinebench 2003 rendering benchmark test suite.

According to PC Magazine, "The Cinebench 2003 test shows that the Power Mac has some heavy-duty graphics rendering horsepower, and that the dual 2.7-Ghz CPU's can help you get your job done quicker with applications written to take advantage of the second processor."

Take note, those bad boy PC machines the magazine was comparing to the dual G5 have the same graphics cards as those in the Mac and cost just as much if not more than the dual Power Mac system. So that Cinebench score is telling you something about the processor and system bus performance of the Power Mac lineup. However, the Mac doesn't have dual core chips yet. Just wait until they do!

To read the full review go here.

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