MacNoob

As much as I love my Macbook Pro and use it at the office for almost everything, there’s no way I could consider converting our site to Apple.  As an IT manager, I have come to love the security and reliability OS X represents, but when I think about the logistics of converting our 120 workstation site to Macs, I hit more than one brick wall.

Let’s suppose for a moment that my servers are fine and I wouldn’t need to change a thing for them to work with Macs.  Lets also suppose everyone on-site would love a new Apple computer and would use it without question.  There are still a number of problems Apple has no solution for.

First, Apple doesn’t make a computer suitable for a managed business environment.  For a company with an IT staff, you must provide a workstation that meet these criteria:

• A small to desktop form factor
• A “tool less” chassis with user-replaceable parts
• $1000 maximum cost (w/o display)

Apple has nothing that fits this model.  A Mac Mini is the only machine less than $1000 and it doesn’t even come close to meeting the other two criteria.  An iMac can be had for around a grand and its’ form-factor is OK, but if its’ hard drive fails there’s no way to fix it.  Additionally, an all-in-one form factor marries the display to the CPU, removing even more flexibility from the IT department.  A Mac Pro has user-serviceable parts, but it is huge and there’s no IT manager in the world (who wants to keep their job) willing to pay $2800 for business machines.  Besides, it’s way too much computer for anyone but a graphic artist or a film editor.

Another gaping hole in Apple’s business offering is service.  Enterprises are not going to designate an employee to make appointments with a Genius Bar at their local mall’s Apple store whenever there’s a service issue with a machine.  Dell and HP offer a next business day, on-site service plan at a nominal fee for enterprise customers.  If Apple wants to make even a small dent in the enterprise market shares of these two companies, they must put a much better service model in place.

What Apple needs to do to be a real enterprise player is build something like Psystar is building.  By that I don’t suggest they make a cheap, flimsy computer but rather build a mid-sized, mid-priced machine that meets the above criteria and add a service plan businesses are willing to consider.  This new computer could also be sold to every day consumers as well.  In fact, I’m pretty sure it would be a hit.  Maybe the reason so many people are willing to roll the dice with an unknown like Psystar is because Psystar is filling a huge vacuum created by a hole in Apple’s product line.

When you look at the “Business” section of Apple’s web site, it’s apparent they’re not serious about providing anything close to an enterprise solution.  Apple devotes its’ web space to small businesses like lawyers, doctors and real estate offices.  That’s all well and good, but contrasting Apple with Dell or HP reveals a huge difference in focus. On their sites you see server farms, floors of endless cubicles and service centers with world-class response and distribution networks.  Yes, it may well be smoke and mirrors, but it does, at least, illustrate their intent and focus.

For now, Dell and HP rule the enterprise roost.  Mr. Jobs is certainly aware of what the other guys are doing.  Maybe that type of low-margin, high volume business is something Apple is just not willing to invest in.  I guess the real reason Apple doesn’t put up bigger numbers in the enterprise market is because they just don’t want to.  Yet.

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Working with tight budgets is a reality in today’s IT environment.  Stretching workstation life from three years to four, purchasing 14” laptops instead of 15” models and reducing staff has become the norm for many IT managers.  All to often, information technology is viewed as just a cost of doing business by executives instead of the productivity multiplier it can be when prioritized and funded properly.  Fortunately, advances in technology often provide new solutions or make existing solutions much more affordable.
Such is the case with storage.  With hard disk prices at less than $0.25/GB and falling, there are more inexpensive ways than ever to provide huge amounts of disk space that would have been unheard of even five years ago.  Disk-to-disk backup has all but replaced tape libraries and an average laptop today has more storage than a new Windows 2000 server in its day.  The RAID 5 SAN (Storage Area Network) that cost nearly $100K five years ago sported 1.5 – 2 TB.  That same money will buy 40TB today.
I (my company) bought one of those 2TB SANs a few years back and have really loved it.  We currently boot and operate five servers from the device and man is it fast.  It is populated with 20 10,000 RPM SCSI disks and communicates via two separate 2Gb fiber channels.
I’m sure no one but real geeks are still reading this after that opening diatribe, but now to the cool part.
With roughly 120 users on my network, I was beginning to suffer from “data creep”.  Every computer user experiences this to some degree.  All of us have said at one time or another, “I’ll never fill up that disk!”  Sound familiar?  I remember complaining about my Delphi environment using 120 megs of disk space a few years back.  Now, I download three of four podcasts a day that are bigger than that.  To my point, what originally seemed like an infinite amount of SAN space has recently become a bit cramped.  I either needed more space or less data.  The latter is always the more unpleasant [if not downright impossible] alternative.
Enter the Drobo.
As I studied what data was using the most disk space on my SAN, I discovered over 100 gigs that hadn’t been touched in over five years.  Another 30 gigs was just junk.  Downloaded video, audio and digital photos made up the bulk of it.  While I’m sure its important to somebody, its certainly not mission-critical data, but I don’t want to be the one to decide whether it stays or goes.  I also didn’t have money in the budget to expand my SAN.  The Drobo solved my problem.  Although its not considered an enterprise device, the Drobo does advertise RAID-like data protection and network connectivity for up to 100 users via their DroboShare.  I’m testing those limits.  I do support over 120 users at my site, but it is a 24/7 operation and there are no more than 90 connected users at any given time.

Setting up the Drobo was a snap.  I immediately noticed how everything about the device is geared toward the consumer.  In fact, I kept thinking I had to be missing some manual or other technical data.  The supplied setup docs are little more than a “1, 2, 3” pictograph like the ones you get with a $99 inkjet from Target.  Unboxing, installing the (4) 1TB WD drives, connecting the DroboShare with the supplied USB cable, powering up and connecting the gigabit ethernet was one of the simplest IT tasks I’ve ever performed.  The whole process took less than 10 minutes.  I remember thinking, “That was all there was to it?”  The install CD for the admin software was straightforward.  It automatically updated the Drobo, DroboShare and itself and guided me through the formatting, partitioning and naming the device on my network. I installed it on my Vista PC and my Mac.  Presto!  I’d just added 2.7 TB of gigabit-connected storage to my network.  (2.7 TB is the usable space you get when you populate the Drobo’s four bays with 1TB drives.)

Once the device was up and running, my first step was to move all the data I considered “junk” from my SAN.  The two partitions I’d created showed up immediately in Windows Explorer so moving the data was a simple “copy & paste” exercise.  The Drobo is as fast as I could have hoped for.  The data copy happened at about 6 MB/sec.  Moving the 30 gigs took just a little over an hour.

My next (and last) step was adding a simple “net use” command to our login script to add the Drobo as the “Z” drive to everyone’s workstation.  That was it. In a little under three hours the Drobo was up and running, serving data to 80+ users.  While it is a bit slower than my SAN-based Novell file server, the speed difference is nothing most users would ever notice.  And for less than $1500 I have over doubled our storage capacity.  Now, I have no illusions the Drobo is going to replace my $100K SAN any time soon, but it does exactly what I need.  It gives me a huge amount of protected storage for data that isn’t restricted to certain users or groups and it frees much needed space on my SAN for more “traditional”  policy-controlled file storage.
So far, I’ve heard no complaints from users and “no news is good news” in my business.  The Drobo has only been up for a couple of days, but it certainly doesn’t appear taxed and I’m a happy camper.  My SAN has more free space, the LEDs on the Drobo and DroboShare are green and by budget is still in the black.

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My Dell XPS has been in its bag for over three weeks now.  It is my “official” company-issued computer, but I have a new Vista machine on my desk that I’ve started using for all the Windows heavy lifting.  The surprising thing is just how much of my job I can do on my Mac, once I installed VNC, that is.  (VNC is the remote desktop app we use to connect to any computer on-site.)  I have installed Office 2008 on my Macbook Pro and much of my work involves creating and editing documents.  That is, of course, unless the document contains any VBA code.  You see, Microsoft neglected to add that feature to the newest Mac version of Office.  Most all of the remainder of my job description can be accomplished by remote connections or via a web browser.  All my servers and about 95% of the desktop PCs at my site run the VNC server software allowing me to pop in by simply typing my password.  All our network hardware (printers, switches and routers) sport their own web servers and Firefox works just fine for them.  Most companies have hard and fast rules about using a non-company computer on the company’s network, but since I’m the IT manager (thus, the enforcer of said rules) I get away with using my Mac.

The corporation I work for has mandated so much security software on portable computers, they’ve rendered them virtually unusable.  The two main culprits are SafeBoot and Sygate.  Safeboot encrypts the entire hard disk with 128 bit AES.  In a word, it’s S-L-O-W!!!!  Never mind the stupid screensaver that kicks in every 15 minutes and is too moronic (CIOs call it secure) to remember your user name.  Sygate is the mother of all big brother applications and forces compliance to whatever corporate “security” policy the intellectuals at headquarters think is appropriate.  You must comply with Sygate policy before it will let you log into your network.  It’s just ill-advised paranoia mandated by upper management so they can sleep better at night knowing their network is secure.  Guess what, it’s not!  I suspect installation of this nazi-ware just enabled them to check a couple of boxes on some audit forms that weren’t checked before.  Now, at least, their jobs are safe.

“The CIO”

I’ve worked for three Fortune 500 companys in my life and the IT executives of each seem to read from the same playbook.  I think they are well-intentioned for the most part, but I sometimes wonder if they ever have a creative thought.  It’s almost as if they get all their security ideas from a Symantec brochure.  Oftentimes the initiatives they direct are last year’s solutions to a previous decade’s problems.  When I see the overbearing and machine-crippling “solutions” they’ve provided for us helpless sheep, I can’t help but wonder if they ever read anything current or browse the internet at all.

Using my Mac sidesteps the whole corporate security issue altogether.  There is no Sygate or Safeboot for the Mac because there are no real security issues with OS X and I never keep any proprietary data on my machine.  Yes, the corporate network is still quite safe.  Besides, I think the Mac is just a lot more fun and I really like being the non-conformist.  Actually, there is no company policy regarding any computers other than Windows machines, a loophole you could drive a truck through.  Come to think of it, I know how I can save the company millions.  Next, Ubuntu!