With this approach, Gauvin’s IT team has significantly reduced the cost of PC deployment and support for Marketel. “We’ve reduced deployment time by 50 per cent here. We run 25 servers, 24 hours a day. We take care of more than 150 users, with more every day. Any other division takes five times the support staff to do the same work.”

There are lots of equations used to track IT success and efficiency. Client-to-server industry benchmarks usually say that for every thirty people, you need one big box. If you’ve really got the blues, it might be a ten-to-one ratio. But in the server world, ratios of 50 to one — even 100 to one — are sought after.

Another IT yardstick — storage costs: Gauvin says “Apple has the best storage prices in the business,” citing costs of around $30,000 for one terabyte of competitive SAN offerings, a sum Gauvin exchanged for two new Apple storage solutions with 5.2 TB. “It’s the best storage money can buy, period.”

And speed — network transfers speeds on a Windows server are about 650 megabytes per minute, Gauvin found, while Mac speeds reach 1,600!

Entering the Back Office

Apple’s presence in the backroom was something that couldn’t be considered a few years ago. Many IT departments were locked in to their five year old decisions to stick with the technology of the day; they were unable even if willing to make a move. The concept of ‘Mac in the back’ just didn’t hold a lot of weight until the first shipments of Xserve.

Now, with the current server and storage solutions in a much more robust and well-recognized fourth version, that weight is shifting.

Once Apple’s Mac OS X move to a UNIX base was recognized as a solid development platform in the IT mainstream, more solution providers jumped on board. Hundreds of tools and frameworks that have been developed for UNIX-like systems can be applied.

The strength of the command line is a real back-end advantage for operators as well as developers. With the ease and friendliness of a Mac, however, there’s little need to spend years training to understand it, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire a UNIX junkie.

A few clicks is all it takes.

“Building a PC server takes five to six hours,” says Gauvin. “But it’s better on Mac, for sure. Adding or deploying a server takes sixty minutes; maybe 20 minutes added for SharePoint, and that’s it. It’s ready to hook in.”

Mac OS X talks file server protocols on most every major server platform in the market — including AFP, SMB/CIFS, WebDAV and NFS file services running on UNIX, Linux, Novell, and Windows, as well as its own Server and AppleShare technologies.

Mounting and navigating the file servers happens within the Mac Finder, with its popular drag-and-drop interface. As well, Marketel easily shares documents with its clients on any platform that accesses WebDAV servers.

“The overall server infrastructure is so much better; these are 100 per cent reliable servers with OS X,” Gauvin continues, explaining that his team reboots the servers once every six months or so — just in case they are feeling lonely. And just to see what would happen, there’s one server operating for nearly a year and a half now, with no reboot at all. “That is a solid server,” he says plainly.

Version 10.4 of Mac OS X Server includes support for 64-bit applications, iChat Server secure instant messaging, Weblog Server for publishing Weblogs and Xgrid to turn a group of Macs into a supercomputer.

Next Page: Exceeding the Stated Goals