Apple Snow Leopard Server to pounce on enterprise: preview

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 11 June 2008 10:18

IT Industry - Market

With Apple showing a renewed interest in the enterprise, it should be no surprise that Apple will be releasing a server version of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Some of the features being touted are designed to make this OS an attractive alternative for business servers.

Other examples of Apple addressing the needs of the enterprise market include the forthcoming ability to deliver applications to a private group of iPhones, and Microsoft Exchange support in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard Server will include read/write support for ZFS, a modern file system that supports a variety of features including storage pools, snapshots (the retention of old data blocks when new data is written) and automatic error correction.

The way the file system is based on storage pools as opposed to physical devices means an existing volume can be expanded by adding one or more drives. This contrasts with Apple's HFS+ which limits a volume to one drive or RAID.

Various services delivered by Mac OS X Server are being updated for the Snow Leopard release.

iCal Server 2, the calendaring and scheduling service, gains group and shared calendars, support for emailing invitations to people who don't use iCal Server, and MobileMe-style push notifications and web access.

Podcast Producer 2, Apple's software for creating and publishing audio and video podcasts, gets a new workflow editor to smooth the production process, dual video capture (eg for picture-in-picture effects) and the ability to host locally stored podcasts.

What else is coming in Snow Leopard Server? More features are described on page 2.