Is there something Apple is cooking up with all that Mac “Pro” hardware in the stores or in the pipeline?
Some people will tell you that that macOS Server died off years ago. But as Mark Twain quipped, after a newspaper ran his obituary, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
The latest version of macOS Server, 5.4, shipped September 25, 2017: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-server/id883878097?mt=12 But, unlike the days when Apple had server hardware, the market for Server 5.4 has been greatly diminished, at least for now.
For many highly secure, high-end, server farms, HP owns the market. Yes, there are other players in that game, too. But, here’s the problem, which weighs on the mind of IT people: hacking.
We do not profess to be deep into the details of the IT engineering stratosphere. We used to be. Today, our side of things is more on the executive level. We have broader decisions to make about content delivery.
What we do share with IT engineers are those security concerns. We have been told about how some exploration is being done by two huge media companies. That research is intended to mess up the efforts of hackers. This creative IT wisdom keeps content on the move by switching out hardware configurations as well as operating systems. The content delivery to the consumer remains smooth, but the technology changes as fast as every 5 seconds. At one moment, the media streams are delivering content over HP servers running Windows Server, and the next moment, they switch over to Apple hardware and Mac Server. In overview, we do see how hackers would be thwarted.
The downside is that it isn’t an easy thing to manage. It’s not something you can do with Adobe’s site management features in Dreamweaver.
Can we share the specifics?
Don’t ask.
What fascinates us is if 2 big media companies are using Mac Server, while they reconfigure their HP servers, is the Mac Server about to re-emerge as a significant player on the IT landscape? Is that a portion of what the much-discussed future of the Mac Pro is all about?
We have had to do some technology planning for 2018 and we have budgeted for in-house local area network (LAN) storage. We have always liked Mac Server, but we have had to wrestle with it, many times and have a big, and ever-growing need for such things in a LAN environment.
Of course, that’s fine for when we’re in-studio, but how about when we need those assets while we’re mobile? That’s something we have not figured out for our own LAN uses, but hopefully Apple and Adobe have a plan.
Brighter engineering minds than ours have surely been planning some very innovative solutions to such things. If we, and some big media companies, are a ready-made market, a great server solution could be the new technology gold mine.
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