When I first saw Derrick Story's call for presentation topics for the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, my first thought was that I would like to hear from professionals who have successfully deployed Macintoshes as the primary (or only) enterprise platform.
After considering that idea, I decided that it wouldn't really work as a presentation. But it did seem to me that, if success stories could be communicated to these Mac enthusiasts, it might provide them with some encouragement to push the boundaries of Mac usage in the enterprise.
I emailed that suggestion to Derrick and got an unexpected response: He asked me if I would write up my own success story and send it to him. So in my mind I conjured up a couple of clichés such as, "It has to start somewhere" and "If I can do it anyone can do it", and talked myself into it.
The company I work for, Aqua-Flo Supply, has been in business for over 30 years, providing PVC piping, sprinkler systems and components, landscape products, low-voltage lighting, as well as related plumbing and electrical supplies to contractors and homeowners. In 1996 they took the technology leap, installing an IBM RS/6000 AIX Server and Wyse Terminals running an integrated Point-of-Sale/Accounting system. The four business locations at that time were linked together with 56K Frame Relay circuits and to the Internet using a 64K ISDN line. Macintosh Clones were purchased to handle day-to-day management tasks at each location.
The first step toward enterprise integration was to install VersaTerm on the Mac clones and enable AppleTalk routing over the Frame Relay connections. That allowed the computer users to access the character-based functions of the Point-of-Sale (POS) system. Timbuktu provided file sharing and management over the Wide Area Network.
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By 1999 there were six locations, a few more Macs, and much more traffic on the WAN. The Macs were still happily connecting to the server, but connecting to the Internet brought the whole system to a standstill. It was obviously time to start doing some serious thinking about the future.
I was hired in the spring of 1999 to "Bring Aqua-Flo into the 21st century." Being a Mac enthusiast (and an optimist at heart) I assumed that we would be able to do everything we needed to do without switching platforms. That was then and this, after traversing a few minor rocky places, is now.
One of the first things I did was purchase two new G3 Towers; one for my boss and one for me. Life was sweet! I downloaded a few free utilities and began to set up network and system management procedures. I was able to ping, traceroute, telnet, ftp, and more--contrary to the popular notion that those things were out of the realm of the Mac. But my euphoria was cut short by the realization that there was a correlation between the number of complaints about network stalls and the time I was spending on the Internet. So I had to relegate my Internet access time to after hours while I addressed the issue of updating the network.
The network problems were eventually solved by upgrading the branch router PVCs to 64K and the main router PVC to 128K, replacing old 10-MBit hubs with 10/100-MBit switches, moving from serial printer interfaces to 10/100-MBit Print Servers, upgrading Network Interface Cards in the computers to 10/100-MBit units and installing a T1 Internet connection. Then it was back to the task of setting up the network and system management procedures.
I looked at commercial network monitoring and management packages and found a surprising percentage of packages that actually supported Macs. Most of the commercial software was costly by our standards. However, I did find one that was within our price range and (surprise) it was a Mac-only program. It is called InterMapper, software originally developed at Dartmouth University but which is now sold by Dartware LLC. The cost of a commercial license ranges from $295 to $1,995, depending on the number of devices you will be monitoring. We were able to set it up on a PowerMac 8600. Using a 19-inch monitor we are able to display connections to every device on our now seven-location network on a single screen. It has saved me countless hours of troubleshooting by isolating problems and giving a visual representation of the faults.
When people observe the network monitoring setup I just described, they seem to gain a new respect for the Macintosh platform. On occasion I've had to employ network consultants to help with router problems, and even they are impressed by what they see--they can't believe it's a Mac.
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But the real good news came when Apple introduced Mac OS X. I jumped right on it when it was first released and have never looked back. The first release was, admittedly not quite ready for prime time, but it did the job and allowed me to get started on the learning curve. And, yes there was a fair amount of learning involved for a long-time user of the old Macintosh operating systems, especially with no in-house mentor.
On the surface, Mac OS X is cool looking. If you don't look too far beyond that, the familiar Macintosh experience is still there. Double-click on the HD icon and it opens up to show the folders and applications as before. But even the slightly curious will have a hard time ignoring the column display option, the Dock, and the System Preferences window.
After just a short time you begin to realize how much time you use to spend drilling down through folders in folders to locate a document or application when, in the multicolumn view all of the options are shown for each step, and the path magically unfolds before you as you click on selected icons. The Dock keeps your most frequently used applications at your fingertips, and the System Preferences panel provides functions similar to, but jazzier than, the old OS Control Panel.
All of the standard applications are included with Mac OS X: AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, MS Office, Netscape Communicator, Internet Explorer, as well as all the other popular browsers; Connectix jumped in with Virtual PC; Macromedia just released its advanced MX series of Web site development products; and Adobe is on the bandwagon with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and InDesign.
But, back to reality; I've got systems and networks to monitor and administer. InterMapper and Timbuktu Pro are, of course, programs that I was interested in, and they are already available in native Mac OS X format. But what else is available to help me do my job?
Well, it turns out that it's a whole new world in that respect. Apple has included most of the basic network management tools in Network Utility: Netstat, Ping, Lookup, Traceroute, Whois, Finger, and Port Scan. A respectable Terminal program is also included, providing a means to remotely monitor and administer devices spread out over all of our locations.
In addition to the availability of many of the Mac programs near and dear to our hearts, we suddenly have a wealth of tools and programs that have been developed on the Unix platform under open source. And, yes they can be ported to Mac OS X. In fact, many of them already have been.
I have just begun to scratch the surface of this gold mine, and already I have accumulated tools for remote access, network monitoring and analysis, and system optimization. I recently logged onto http://osx.hyperjeff.net/apps/, a Web site dedicated to identifying native Mac OS X programs. They list nearly 4,500 such applications.
One of our long-term objectives at Aqua-Flo is to develop an e-Commerce presence. Once again, Apple came through; WebObjects by Apple is a native Mac OS X development framework that provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for producing cross-platform or native Mac programs in pure Java, or Web Services applications using XML and Java. It incorporates a complete set of development tools: Project Builder (the IDE), EO Modeler (for database modeling), WebObjects Builder (for building reusable code), Interface Builder (for constructing the graphical interface), and more. Included in the Web Services features are a native XML Coder and a Decoder.
Down from about $50,000 a couple of years ago, WebObjects now costs $695. A sizable community of developers has grown in support of WebObjects, and, in the spirit of open source, there's a very active online forum where users trade questions and answers about WebObjects and programming. (As an aside, WebObjects can also run on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, and probably on any other standard Unix platform.)
For a little lighter programming, Apple has included AppleScript Studio which puts a graphical interface on the AppleScript program. For the price ($0), AppleScript provides an amazing amount of power for automating system and program functions. Although I have only dabbled in it a bit up to this point, I have observed that the same kind of user support is available for AppleScript (as well as for Mac OS X, Java, HTML, and a host of other subjects).
As an Apple Developer (I signed onto the Select program for $500 per year, but the ADC Online program is free), I have access to the latest developer tools, plus some technical support, and hardware and software discounts. The documentation from Apple is freely accessible. The sheer volume of tutorials and manuals available is staggering; everything you need for getting up to speed with WebObjects and all its related topics. We have taken the plunge, and are knee-deep in the waters of Web development, using DreamWeaver and WebObjects. We'll continue this effort to model our e-Commerce site using Business Rules, based on our existing Point-of-Sale/Accounting system operation.
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By late 2001 I was comfortable enough with the new system that I began to roll it out to the enterprise. We now have about 99 percent of our Macs upgraded to Mac OS X 10.1.5 and running with hardly a hitch. There is only one application (terminal emulation) that we still need to run under OS 9 (technically speaking, it runs in Classic mode under OS X), and it's coming under fire.
There is now at least one OS X commercial terminal emulation program with the advanced features we need to access our legacy system. I have tested the trial version and found it to be an elegant, functional program that indeed runs natively under OS X. Rumor has it that the next major release of OS X (v. 10.2, code-named Jaguar) will include a much more advanced Terminal program, which should have all of the features we need for terminal emulation, but also more advanced features for System and Network Administration.
Given the current state of the economy, all of these developments in the Mac world have come at a most opportune time. Any IS Manager must feel the pressure, whether from upper management or just from reading the news, to keep IT costs at an absolute minimum. Without the open source/open support that has evolved over the past year or two, we would not have been able to make the significant improvements in Systems and Network Administration that we have seen at Aqua-Flo.
As the level of sophistication grows, we will be able to keep closer tabs on performance and develop more effective ways to keep performance optimized. While it may require some additional man-hours to do the monitoring and optimizing of the growing list of server and network equipment, we have already proven that the gains in performance can outweigh the additional labor costs.
On the software front, the emergence of low-cost and open source development tools means that we can devote a larger fraction of our resources to obtaining the key personnel and advanced hardware that will be needed to support a full-fledged e-Commerce site. We will be able to produce a more functional, more scalable solution than would have been possible just a couple of years ago. At the same time, the technologies that are used in modern Web site development will be available to us for the development of new approaches to data access and information sharing. We will be able to provide management with direct access to critical data, bypassing cumbersome report-writing procedures. We will be able to provide employee access to corporate forms, policies and procedures, and open selected company information and applications to access by selected customers or vendors.
From my perspective, the opportunity to apply the unique capabilities of the Mac platform to traditional Systems and Network Administration, as well as to be involved in ground breaking new Web technologies is extremely exciting. The Mac is emerging as the new platform of choice for more and more IS/IT managers, validating the decision that many users made years ago.
Marley Graham is IS Manager for Aqua-Flo Supply, a distributor of irrigation supplies in Southern California.
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