Apple's Leopard Mac OS X Server Coming October 26

Published: October 18, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Apple Computer announced this week that it will be unveiling and delivering its "Leopard" Mac OS X v10.5 operating systems for desktops and servers on October 26. Apple previewed the desktop and server editions of its Unix-derived operating system back in June, and is clearly hoping that the new code drives some software and hardware upgrades. If Apple played its cards right, it could even go so far as to position Mac OS X Server v10.5 as an alternative to Windows and Linux--but history suggests Apple will simply pitch Leopard Server to its installed base.

As many of us have pointed out time and again, Apple's Mac OS X platform is perhaps the ideal Unix platform. Based on the open source FreeBSD Unix variant, equipped with the Apple graphical user interface, and rigged with a PowerPC-to-X64 emulation environment called Rosetta (compliments of QuickTransit emulation software licensed from Transitive), Mac OS X is a much easier version of Unix to drop into a company than AIX, Solaris, or HP-UX--particularly for companies with no Unix experience.

Leopard Server v10.5 is an Open Brand UNIX 03 registered product and conforms to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for C programming language APIs, shell utilities, and threads. (Is that nerdy enough for you?) Leopard Server v10.5 fully supports 64-bit memory extensions while maintaining 32-bit compatibility, and the graphical system libraries--including Cocoa, X11, and OpenGL--can run as 32-bit or 64-bit processes with the new release. Leopard Server is now aware of dual-core and quad-core Core and Xeon processors from Intel, and the process schedulers and memory algorithms in the underlying FreeBSD operating system have been tweaked to take advantage of extra cache memory and multiple cores in such chips.

As previously reported, the TCP/IP stack, the NFS server, and the AutoFS automounter inside Leopard Server v10.5 have all been rewritten to take advantage of multicore processors and POSIX thread allocation algorithms have been optimized for multicores using the NSOperation APIs. Leopard's NFS file system implementation now supports Kerberos authentication as well as the existing Unix user ID authentication method, too. The TCP/IP stack has been modified with self-tuning algorithms as well, which allow it to squeeze the best performance out of the bandwidth available on the network--and change itself as conditions change on the network. Leopard also includes a variant of Sun Microsystems Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) for debugging and profiling the performance of applications running on the operating system. The Darwin kernel underneath Mac OS X is now fitting with DTrace ports and the Java, Ruby, Python, and Perl programming languages available for Leopard have been extended so they know about DTrace as well. Sun's Zettabyte File System was available in early betas of Leopard Server, but does not seem to have made the cut in the production version.

Leopard Server also includes file sharing with other Macs as well as Windows, Linux, and Unix machines, the Mail mail server, the iCal calendar server, the iChat chat server, and virtual private networking services. The server edition also has Xgrid grid computing integrated into it, as well as two features called Wiki Server and a Podcast Producer, which do exactly what their names suggest. (The Podcast Producer can employ Xgrid to use a network of Macs to encode podcasts, and then host them on the server, which is very cool and smart.) A variant of online search called Spotlight Server is network-aware and can find files across a network, not just on the server on which it is running. Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, Cyrus, and a number of other open source tools have been ported into Leopard Server and run in 64-bit mode. A feature called Time Machine, which is an automatic backup utility that stores the entire state of your machine to an external storage device for future recovery, is also a neat feature, and one that will probably drive upgrades to Leopard Server.

If you have an old PowerPC-based machine using G3 processors, you can forget about running Leopard Server. And if you have a PowerPC G4 or G5 machine, you will need a box that has processors that run at least at 867 MHz to support the new server edition. Intel processors have run at speeds in excess of 1 GHz for a long time now, and Apple has never sold Core or Xeon machines that did not have enough oomph to run Leopard Server. Apple is taking orders for Leopard Server now. It costs $499 for a 10-user license and $999 for an unlimited user license; upgrading that 10-user license to an unlimited user license costs $499, so you can save yourself $1 by doing it in two steps. (A dollar will buy you an iPod song with a penny to spare, after all.) Shipping for the software is free if you preorder it. The desktop and laptop version of Leopard costs $129, by the way.

The real question is not whether Leopard Server is going to be a good operating system. Of course it will be, and one that many commercial companies, tired of wrestling with Windows and not acquainted with the inner workings of Linux or Unix, would find an appropriate fit for computing environments. But the Mac OS platform has two major problems that Apple has never addressed and that limits its success in corporate computing. The first is that the Xserve server line is too limited and too expensive. A two-socket, rack-mounted server does not fit all needs, and with Mac OS X now running on Intel iron, there is simply no excuse for Apple to not offer a wider range of tower, rack, and blade servers for Mac OS X customers. Intel has been selling quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon processors for 11 months now--which is one of the main drivers of its resurgence in the chip market in the past year--but Apple is still peddling Xserve machines that use older "Woodcrest" dual-core Xeons. This is just plain stupid, and certainly too dumb for such a genius as Steve Jobs. Apple should have very skinny single-socket, quad-core servers in a 1U chassis with lots of SAS disk storage as well as a 2U server with four quad-core "Tigerton" Xeon 7300 processors for handling very large workloads. A 3U variant of this Xserve should have a built in storage area network. And yes, Apple should have two-socket and four-socket blade servers, and if it can't build them, then it should license blade chasses and blades from Intel.

The second problem, which is related to the first, is application certification. Enterprises like their middleware, database, development tool, and enterprise application choices. If Apple wants to be a serious player in the data center, then it should take some of those iPod profits and get the key middleware, database, and ERP software packages certified to run on an expanded line of Xserve products. Apple could, of course, take the easy way out and provide an upgrade to the Rosetta emulation environment that would allow Linux-X64 and Solaris-X64 applications to run in emulated mode atop Mac OS X Server on Intel iron. Transitive is surely in favor of such an idea, and end users may not care, so long as the code runs. It's something to think about.

There is a lot more margin in the server business than there is in laptops and desktops--even compared to Apple laptops and desktops, which is saying a lot considering the premium that Apple can and does charge to Apple zealots.

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