Alright, I’m feeling sheepish.

Three weeks into my 2012 blogging resolution, I slipped and didn’t post on Friday. I had this post almost done, but I just … couldn’t … finish it (Before the end of the day.) But instead of beating myself up over it, I figured better late than never. So here goes, the third installment in fifty-two blogposts, a week and a half late:

The second week of 2012, two – maybe four – of the five best stories focused on security.

This statement of course depends on what you consider “security.” It’s easy enough to make the case that the first two posts were about security – they both have the word in their respective titles. The first post is about a security hole found in many home and small business firewalls, a hole that is the result of an attempt by manufacturers to make their firewalls easier to configure, easier to deploy, and easier to secure; unfortunately, they this made the firewalls easier to hack. The second post is about a counter-intuitive finding: a three digit password on your cellphone can be harder to crack than a four digit password; don’t take my word for it, read the post. A case could be made that the next two posts are also about security: 1) what’s more important to your personal security than knowing how polluted your personal airspace is, and 2) if Google, giant of the internet that it is, makes massive changes to how it delivers your search results, basing this on the personal information is has about you, don’t you think you would have a few questions about your online security too? The last post has nothing to do with security, but everything to do with SEO. If you’re interested in SEO, you’ll love it. If you don’t give two figs for SEO, or don’t even know what it is, the post probably isn’t for you.

Happy reading!

New Tools Bypass Wireless Router Security

The technology at issue here is “Wi-Fi Protected Setup” (WPS), and it was meant to help users with little to no experience in setting up a firewall to set up a firewall, securely. Instead of guiding users through a complicated path of security settings, firewall manufactures could use WPS to allow their customers to make broad changes by entering an 8 character pin found on the bottom of the firewall. Unfortunately, an 8 character pin is vulnerable to a brute force attack. Give the article a read to find out how to protect your network.

Why repeating a digit may improve security on your iPhone’s 4-digit lockscreen PIN

When conducting a brute force attack, four characters are easier to hack than eight, but it seems three characters might be harder to crack than four … so long as you’re talking about iPhone screen passcodes. This guy figured that if you use three numbers in your iPhone passcode (using one of the numbers two times), it would be more difficult for someone to hack into your phone by looking for the telltale smudges that your fingers leave when you unlock your phone. Better yet, he didn’t just suppose that three was more secure than four – he actually did the math to prove it.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Large Facilities

This one is browser-based tool from the EPA. Plug in a few basic pieces of data, and you can see which companies are the biggest polluters in your neighborhood, or in someone else’s neighborhood for that matter. Good walls make good neighbors, but walls can’t keep out pollution. Give the tools a looksee and learn about what’s going on in your neck of the woods.

Search, plus Your World

With Search, Plus Your World, Google made a significant change to how the way the Internet operates. The ramifications of this move are so huge, that I can’t summarize their impact right now. Expect a blogpost only concerning this change – it’s coming.

What’s the best course, training, book, or resource on SEO?

I was polishing up on a little SEO last week, and I came across this Quora thread. It is seriously fantastic. If you want to learn about SEO and how it affects what you see on the Internet (or how to use SEO techniques to get your content seen on the Internet), this is great place to start. Even if you’ve been working in SEO since Hector was a pup, I’ll bet you my last dime that you’ll find something of interest over in this thread.

Alright folks, that’s it for today; I hope you enjoyed the post.

The best stories from last week were best stories of 2012 so far.

If you saw last week’s post: 2011′s Best Stories and a Resolution for 2012*, you know that I have made a resolution to blog  consistently this year. While this is an ongoing, yearly resolution that always falls through the cracks, this year I’ve decided to structure my blogging habits around a post every Friday that collects the most interesting stories from the previous week.

Of course, there’s no objective way to decide which stories were the most interesting in a given week, so I’ve decided to take a totally subjective route.

In this weekly summary are the stories that I shared that got the highest clickthrough rate. They are listed from the highest rate of clickthrough, to the lowest. If you want to read a quick runthrough of how I’m choosing my post, click here.

So here’s the most popular stories from the first week of 2012. Hope you enjoy.

Batman in the Style of Dr. Seuss

When I shared this link on Facebook lat week, I said, “Awesomest thing you’ll see today, I betcha.” I should have said, “This link is irresistible to clicking,” because it was, and ended up topping this week’s list. Both Batman and the drawings of Dr. Seuess are cultural American icons; when you put the two together, wonderment is made.

Stealth Mountain, A Twitter Bot That Corrects Misuse of “Sneak Peak”

While the clicks on this link came from across the board, the majority came from Twitter (Unsurprisingly). This post was about a bot that trolls Twitter, looking for people who misspell the word peek, when typing the term Sneak Peek. Like the Yodabot and the Poutinebot (Who unfortunately has been suspended by Twitter), @StealthMountain gives Twitter users to chuckle. Unlike all the rest, @StealthMountain teaches you grammar while doing it.

Pentagon Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear

The future is now, or at least it’s coming. A Pentagon-funded scientific experiment resulted in scientists being able to hide an event for 40 picoseconds, by bending light waves. While that’s just a microblip of time, we’re only at the beginning of this field of study & the possibilities loom.  When I asked Tom Jones what he would do with a couple minutes of hidden time, he said that he didn’t have to wait for the future – 40 picoseconds was plenty of time. What would you do if your actions were invisible?

New Tools Bypass Wireless Router Security

This blog is the company blog of an IT Solutions provider, and one of the problems with blogging and/or sharing information about networks, security, disaster recovery and the like is that the number of people who find these topics interesting isn’t as great as the number of people who love Batman and Dr. Seuss mashups. But this week, I shared a post on a dangerous security hole that can be found in many home wireless network routers and the traffic went through the roof. The takeaway of the post is this: if your home router has WPS, you  are vulnerable to a brute-force attack. If you want to know how, and how to fix it, read the article.

Last week, Google+ rolled out the ability for business pages to have multiple managers. Business Social Media practicioners have been waiting for this development for awhile now & this update brought relief. If you’re in the business marketing space, this page is a how-to from Google, explaining how page ownership and management works. If you’re not in the space, the page is still about the Google+ page ownership and management, but it might be as less interesting to you.

So that’s it for this week – I hope you found some benefit & enjoy the snow!

 Written by Joe Robb

Today is the last day of the first work week of 2012 & I have resolutions.

Lots of them.

And like every year, many of these resolutions will be forgotten by February. Dropping resolutions is part of the human condition. So I may not write as many blog posts as I promised myself I would, and I may not run as regularly as I had planned, but I have made one resolution that I won’t let fall by the wayside.

Here goes: Every Friday, I will write a recap of the most interesting posts from the week before.

The Internet is less a stream than a flood of information. It’s easy to hop in and float along with the current, swallowing what you can, but it’s impossible to ingest everything – you don’t have the time. No one does. But if we aggregate content that lots of people liked and found interesting, the likelihood that you might the enjoy the content increases.

What are the rules?

I use Google’s url shortener to shorten & track almost all of my links, and have been doing so for nearly a year. (I switched from tinyurl in April because it doesn’t offer robust tracking capabilities. Plus, Google automatically creates QR codes for every shortened link and everyone knows that you should use QR codes if you want to be taken seriously.)

Each week, I’ll look at which links got the most clicks during the previous week & I’ll post those links here, along with a short description. Since this is the first week of the new year & since I’m doing this for the first time, I’m going to start with the top ten links from last year.

2011′s most popular links:

Facebook users no longer have to “like” your Page (and what that means)?

Though the title punctuation drove me crazy, the post was was worth a read. For the first time, Facebook users did not have to “Like” a Facebook page to comment on the wall of that page. It was a major change for Facebook marketing, though most SM professionals I talked with said that the change didn’t affect their Facebook marketing strategy one bit.

Google just got ZAGAT Rated

2011 was the year Google absorbed Zagat and gained massive credibility chops in the restaurant review space. Google made this move just as they were being brought to task by companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor for what they considered unfair localized search result practices. At the time of this acquisition, the general concensus was that Google was attempting to create a one stop shop for local business searches. With the release of Google+ business pages that tie into the rest of the Google tool set, this guess doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

A TRUE MEASURE OF INFLUENCE

This is my favorite blog post from 2011. It’s insightful, interesting, actionable, and Tom Webster wasn’t afraid of writing a long  post to get his point across. I’d only suggest reading this one if you have an interest in marketing, a little time, and curiosity.

A Single Day Of Uploaded Flickr Photos Printed Out

In 2011, a Giant Lego Man Washed Up on the Beach

No question as to why this link was clicked on so much. I think you should click over right now, even if you’ve already seen pictures of the exhibit, because a picture is worth 1,000 words, and these pictures are pictures of thousands of pictures. Words cannot do justice.

It’s Official: To Protect Baby’s Brain, Turn Off TV

I became a father about a year ago, and all of a sudden I found myself posting about babies. I’ve always had a  soft spot for any science article concerning the brain and how it’s formed, and since this one was about infant brain development this article was a slam dunk.

Study: Older Siblings Have Higher IQs

As the oldest of three siblings, I found myself nodding my head as I read this article. Unless one of my sisters ask, then I haven’t read it, and the title sounds suspicious.

How To BATCH BLOCK Google+ Spammers Avoid Spam Messages ?

Google+ is still so shiny and new that pretty much any “how-to” post concerning the platform will catch online interest. Of all the Google+ posts I linked to in 2011 (which toward the end of the year ended up being quite a few), this one got the most click-through. Believe it or not, people really hate SPAM.

What teachers really want to tell parents

This is the link that sparked the most offline conversations for me last year. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, my wife is a teacher, and about half of my extended family teaches. I have strong convictions about education, and I found this article interesting. Take a sec and give it a read – you’ll be glad you did.

McAfee: Nearly All New Mobile Malware In Q3 Targeted At Android Phones

If you work in the online marketing space, you already know that phones using an Android OS make up the largest share of the smartphone market. If you work in the information technology arena, you know that malware is almost always developed to attack the largest market share. Malware in the mobile space doesn’t buck the trend.

How hackers gave Subway a $3 million lesson in point-of-sale security

If you used your debit card at any Subway last year, you and your bank account may be at risk. Subway takes credit cards/debit cards in payment, and by law they are required to go through, and pass, PCI Compliance testing. PCI Compliance is a relatively easy process of ensuring that a organization’s firewall is up to snuff and configured properly. (Our company, Global Business Solutions does PCI Compliance testing for most of our clients.) Unfortunately, many Subway franchisees didn’t go through the necessary steps to ensure that their network was secure, and hackers were able to steal financial information and use the data to steal millions of dollars. For some, it looks like a footlong was significantly more than five dollars.

Hope you enjoyed this summary of last year’s top news. Tune in next Friday for interesting posts from this week.

Written by Joe Robb

Towards the end of last year, a programmer names Eric Butler released a Firefox browser extension  he dubbed “Firesheep“. You may remember hearing something about it. What the extension allowed users to do – with relative ease – is intercept unencrypted website cookies as they are in transit over insecure networks. With the extension, the Firesheep user can “session-hijack” the account of the user who was sending their credentials over the unencrypted network connection. With the nefarious click of a button, an unsuspecting user could all of a sudden lose control of their Facebook account or their Twitter account, or even their online account at the local library.

It was just terrible.

For awhile, a few weeks at least, talk about Firesheep spread like wildfire. The Internet community was up in arms, and the outrage was palpable. Then the talk lessened. Within two months, the last, smoldering embers of conversation died out. Which is almost enough to make you think that Firesheep has gone away, because if it hadn’t, people would still be talking about it.

Firesheep hasn’t gone away.

If you’re reading this blog post on a laptop, on a unsecured wireless network, there’s a chance that someone is firesheeping you RIGHT NOW. Or maybe (if they have an Android) they’re faceniffing you!

Firesheep did not go away; all that time has brought are new tools that offer a broader array of session-hijacking abilities.

Do not fear, there are ways to protect yourself from session-hijacking. Are you ready to find out how?

Let’s do it!

The best solution is to set up a VPN connection to a secure network. (Full disclosure: This blog is the company blog of Global Business Solutions, and we do set up VPN connections for our clients.) But in actuality, most users don’t want to go to through the hassle of creating a VPN connection, just to log onto Facebook.  Users also have the option of enabling a https: connection whenever they go to a website, for which they have login credentials.

Enabling a https: connection is relatively simple. If you use the Firefox browser, you can add the HTTPS Everywhere extension, which will encrypt most websites as you log into them. If you are game for a little more detective work and would like to know if someone is trying to grab your credentials, you could use the Blacksheep Firefox extension, which will notify you if someone is using Firesheep to spy on your browsing.

But let’s be honest: what you really want to do – just like 750 billion other users – is to ensure that no one hacks your Facebook account. Because that would put the cherry on top of a horrible sundae. If this is the case for you, the easiest solution is to force Facebook to only operate with https: enabled.

Want to know how to do it? Watch the video below.

What other ways do you ensure secure browsing? We’d like to know, and would be thrilled if you told us in the comments below.

Post by Joe Robb

The middle of last week, Facebook decided that you wanted your pictures automatically tagged, so that the rest of the world could see what you do when you’re not online.

In the dead of night, they flipped the switch on their “Facial Recognition” feature.

Facebook asked your friends to point you out in their pictures. As they are friendly, they did so, and now FB knows what you look like. Facebook’s propitiatory facial recognition software has begun scanning all pictures uploaded into itself and it will automatically tag you in pictures you didn’t even know about.

Remember your first party in college? Remember that time you skipped work and dressed up like a fairy? You’ll see the photographic memories soon enough.

Luckily, there’s a way to disable the feature, giving Facebook users a way to opt-out of the service. We made a video that will walk you through the steps.

Here goes:

While disabling this feature will ensure that your “friends” won’t be prompted by Facebook to tag you in photos they might otherwise not tag you in, disabling does not turn off the facial recognition software. We have not seen any mention from Facebook or any of the Social Media news outlets about how you can disable the software itself. It seems that the new facial-recognition aspect of the platform is here to stay, putting FB in direct opposition to Google. Google developed a similar type of software recently, but has so far refused to roll it out, citing privacy concerns. In the ongoing struggle of which company is going to control social interactions on the web in the next few years, FB’s embrace of facial recognition could be a deciding factor, particularly if it can avoid the ire of government officials.

What do you think about this new facial recognition software? Is it cause for concern, or a new type of service that will quickly be seen as the norm?

Post by Joe Robb

“Green” is a word tripping off many people’s tongues right now. As consumers, we are being bombarded from all angles by companies touting their commitment to “Earth Friendly” products and practices, hoping that you will feel good about your purchases because they are good for the environment, and that good feeling will lead to more purchases.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

Like many consumers, when I look at Green products or services, I look at not only how much waste can be eliminated by going the more environmentally friendly route, but I also think about how being Green can benefit my bank account. Luckily, in many cases, being Green saves you green.

Take IT, for instance – many businesses don’t consider the greening of business technology as being a way to save money, but it undoubtedly is.  The first step most businesses take is  to become a”paperless” office environment, hoping to realize the immediate cost benefit inherent in reducing paper use. However, a paperless office can cut costs in a multiple ways. There is the obvious cutback in the amount of paper being used, but there is also the secondary benefits of reducing the amount of space needed to store blank paper and filing that paper after it has been used. If storing onsite, the business is paying the heating and cooling costs required for that space; if storing offsite,  they must pay rent. All these costs can be lessened with a “paperless” solution. But there are so many different ways beyond the idea of the “paperless” office  to reduce spending by investing in green products and services.

First, look at the equipment you use now. Finding the threshold between whether or not it is beneficial to keep old computer equipment around instead of replacing that equipment can be difficult. No one really wants to throw away a functioning computer - no matter how old – because it runs, and the act of throwing away working equipment feels wasteful. Without taking into account the green capabilities of newer devices, it is hard to argue against that feeling.  But business decisions should not be based on feelings, but rather data.

The real question is: how efficient is your equipment?

Which Computer is More Efficient?

New computers use far less energy than computers from even from a year ago, and the purchase of new computers will allow businesses to realize these energy/cost savings immediately. But there is an added bonus as well: newer equipment often lead to increased user productivity.  Many older computers are slow enough that they are detrimental to the workflow of the user; if your employees are waiting on their computers to finish their respective tasks, you are wasting money on productivity.

It’s also good to keep in mind that you don’t have to throw away old equipment, instead your equipment can be repurposed, donated, or recycled. If you live in the Greater Cincinnati area, you can donate your computer equipment to, or recycle with, the Cincinnati Computer Cooperative. (Note: Before donating or recycling your equipment, ensure that your data is secure by either erasing hard disks, or removing the hard disks altogether.  Also check your CD drive, you’d be surprised how often sensitive data is left in the CD drive.)

When looking at end user systems for your business, you may find that notebooks offer better energy savings than desktops while offering the same level of performance.  Notebook processors, along with many other laptop components, often use less power; normal notebook AC adapters are rated for between 45-90 watts, while a desktop power supply would run 300+ watts.  With the included battery, notebooks also offer the built in power redundancy that you would need to purchase separately for a desktop.

The area where businesses can conserve the most energy is in the back end, the server room, with solutions like Server Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, and Cloud Computing, all of which are taking the IT industry by storm.  Efficiency gains in Server Virtualization comes by way of eliminating power hungry and inefficient physical servers and placing virtualized versions of these servers on one, energy efficient host.  One well equipped host server will use the otherwise wasted processor cycles by running multiple installations of server software, thus utilizing processing capabilities that would otherwise be wasted in idle time.

Domain Controller, Mail Server, File Server, Terminal Services and other such servers can be run in separate environments but run on the same physical server.  Cutting down on the number of physical servers in your IT closet can not only save you the money you would spend on multiple servers, but it also saves you on the amount of space needed to run those servers and reduces the cost of running the appropriate HVAC to cool that space.

Another option – Desktop Virtualization – is a an old idea from the days of the Client/Server era: all of a business’ data and processing should be done on the main frame and only the results are sent to the terminal.  With the advent of new options in technology, a modified version of the idea is making a strong comeback and has been implemented by many of our clients. Using Citrix, we virtualize the users’ desktop experience, which in turn requires either less powerful desktops or a thin client system.  The server does all the work, allowing for a consistent desktop experience from anywhere, one that often requires less support as well.  Businesses also save money through software licensing: rather than installing MS Office (for example) on every desktop, you can virtualize the desktop and deliver it within a Citrix Environment, requiring fewer concurrent licenses.

“Cloud Computing” is a phrase you have doubtlessly heard as well. The idea there is to store your data offsite, in “The

You could go the way of the cloud.

Cloud” – basically a collection of data warehouses across the country that will you to access your critical business data without having network infrastructure in house.  Many of these data warehouses have been built with green standards in mind; like your business, these data hosts want to save money. With Cloud Computing, your cost savings will be realized in the equipment you don’t have to buy and the energy you don’t have to consume to host your data; on the flip side, your business will have a considerably higher bandwidth cost so that you can access that data.

There are many of ways to add efficiency to both your workflow and your business IT environment while reducing your impact on the greater environment; many of these solutions can be put into practice without any downtime. Being Green is more than a responsibility to the planet, it is a responsibility to your business. Your return on investment may take longer in some instances than others, but remember that your cost savings extend beyond just what you see in savings on your electric bill.

Photo by Tom Raftery and Ivan Walsh

A little while ago, on election day, I was playing around with one of the newer offerings from Facebook: Friendship Pages.

These pages provide a space, recently created by Facebook, which gathers public wall posts, comments, events and photos from the feed of two “friends”, and then parses this data by post type, arranges the data into chronological order, thereby creating a history of the two users’ Facebook friendship. This page can be viewed by either of the parties whoose data makes up the page, or by a third party user who is friends with both of the two primary users.

Confusing, right? Even Facebook’s explanation of the new pages were a little flummoxing, so I put together a graphic in hopes that it might simplify understanding:

Friendship Pages aggregate shared data between two users.

In the graphic above, the events and conversations shared in common by both Facebook users show up on the Friendship page, because both post types are shared between both users. The pictures of F1 are not displayed on the Friendship Page because those pictures do not reference user F2. If the user F2 had been tagged in any of F1′s photos, this photo would show up on the Friendship page. But since F2 wasn’t tagged, these photos don’t show up on the Friendship Page. Make sense? I hope so.

To get back to the story–I was prodding these new Friendship pages, and since it was election day my eyes were drawn to any post that mentioned politics. As I’m sure you have noticed, most people use Facebook as a platform to talk about their hopes and dreams, their daily goings-on, what they like and dislike; all of these themes gather nicely under the umbrella of politics. For the three months leading up to this election, my feed had been flooded with invitations to political rallies, forums addressing pertinent issues, and political propaganda. Though I do not engage in political discussions on Facebook–this is part of my SM policy, it would be dishonest to say that I don’t read political postings; reading these posts is part of what makes Facebook fun.

So there I was, playing with Friendship Pages, when I stumbled upon this:

Who did Mr. Red vote for?

First off, let me say that I talked to Mr. Red and he asked that I let everyone know that he meant to write “ballot” instead of “balance”. Just wanted to clear that up .

Secondly, a question: who did Mr. Red vote for?

Based upon the screenshot you see above, do you think that you could accurately guess who Mr. Red’s candidate of choice was on this past election day? Of course you can, because the information you need to make an accurate guess is given to you through his Facebook posts. And is it likely that you could guess Mr. Blue’s political leanings as well . . . probably. Though we don’t see any responses from Mr. Blue, we can see that they both “like”  a political commentator that heavily identifies with one party, so it’s likely he voted along the party line.

But none of this is new; Facebook posts display little pieces of you for all the world to see. People have used Facebook to talk about personal issues long before the advent of the Friendship Page and will continue to do so until Facebook gives way to the next, big social platform. This information is sitting out there for all the world to see, even if the user deletes it, for who knows how long?

So how do Friendship Pages alter the data game?

The information you share everyday creates online personae that may or may not accurately reflect who you are and who you believe yourself to be. These personae filter out to the different people you have “friended” over the years, and they see the particular persona you share with them as indicative of who you actually are. Friendship Pages change all this. They allow users to see the persona created by your interactions with one particular user, over the long haul.  Now you can see–not just what people post day in and day out–but also how your friends act when interacting with people other than you.

It’s like listening in on a party line, or better yet, like listening to the recordings of telephone conversations between two friends that you were never a part of. You can now see how one user modifies their behavior to fit another user’s preferences, and how this modification influences their interactions. As a passive spectator, you can look at weeks of interaction between two users and this will inform your beliefs about who these two users are.

It’s now harder to parcel your online self into different packages to offer to your “friends”; this development forces you to become more transparent in who you are online, because if you aren’t, it’s now more likely that one of your friends will call you out. For many, this will change how they will use Facebook.

Are you afraid that Friendship Pages will reveal your love of Jai Alai to all? How have you modified your behavior because of this new development?

Post by Joe Robb

Apple recently announced that, as of January 31st, 2011, they will no longer offer the Xserve 1U rack mounted server.

The Pretty Ones Always Seem to Be the First to Go

The Xserve server was the latest (and final) offering in what Apple dubbed as their “Enterprise Hardware Solution”, going the way of the Xserve RAID (Apple’s SAN storage device) and the Xserve cluster node, both of which quietly disappeared from the lineup a while ago.  This announcement has drawn heavy press from the consumer market with most speculating on the future of Apple’s enterprise offerings, whether or not they will continue to develop for the enterprise market, with some reporters questioning Apple’s strength as a whole.  I’d like to offer my thoughts on what this announcement and what I think it may mean for Apple’s future.

I believe that this announcement reflects Apple’s unwillingness to produce hardware for this market, but does not signal a desire to abandon the market as a whole. While they discontinued the Xserve RAID, Apple continues to sell the Promise-branded RAID Shelves through their site.  With the discontinuation of the Xserve, it appears that Apple is recommending a MacPro desktop as a replacement, which is certainly capable of out-performing the Xserve at a reasonable price, the only downside being the inherent limitations of a desktop server when compared to a rack-mounted. Apple also offers the Mac OS X Server in a Mac mini configuration, eliminating the slot load optical drive for a second 2.5″ hard disk running in RAID 0. This is a very inexpensive solution, perfect for the hobbyist or to be used as a small, home media server.

According to a brief email response from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it appears that no one was actually buying the Xserve, which is understandable since a user can install Mac OS X Server on a MacPro, getting better performance at half the cost.  The Mac OS X Server is being used more frequently by small businesses–especially design and video production houses–but also features excellent expandability.  This cost-conscious expandability was most famously seen with Virginia Tech’s System X, where 1,100 units were clustered to build the 47th fastest super computer in the world in 2006; at the time it cost a fifth as much as the 2nd least expensive supercomputer on the list of of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, while still achieving 12.25 teraflops of processing power.

Mac OS X Server offers nearly everything a small business needs: DNS, Webserver, Mail Server, Firewall, Fileserver, Spam Firewall, Print Server, Authentication, Group Calendars. It even offers it’s own Podcast production server and can be used as a boot server for remote systems (NetBoot).  All of these features offer a very high level of configurability and does so without additional licensing from Apple.  In many cases, most of these services can be run on the same system, and from my experience seems like a more reliable solution than Microsoft’s Small Business Server.

After reading a few posts from Apple-focused technology sites, I think that the conversation is dominated by a chicken little response, driven mostly by consumers who have little to no experience with the product, and small businesses owners/IT staff who are currently running the server in their places of business. While the discontinuation of the Xserve may seem dramatic to some, it wasn’t a surprise to many in the support field.  From the beginning, Apple had built very little margin into the system and the most recent numbers have indicated that they sold fewer than 8,000 units a year.

So where is Apple headed in the enterprise market?

Apple continues to develop Mac OS X Server and Xsan software, both of which are popular choices to run many, different applications. As I mentioned before, they do still offer a server solution, bundling Mac OS X Server with a Mac Pro and Mac mini.  But I’m banking on them loosening the reigns on their Apple-only policy, which allows only Apple software to be installed on their hardware. Today, right now, it already is possible to install Mac OS X on a VMware virtual, it just isn’t supported by Apple. We’ll see either a change in policy, or a completely new hardware offering.  My money is on a policy change that supports virtualization; this would make sense both as a way to increase profitability, as well as creating a solution that is more friendly to the average IT professional. Since a smaller investment is required to learn how to implement a virtualized solution–especially if there is nothing more than a software license needed–a new hardware offering appears is unlikely.  What is unclear to me  is how Apple plans to change their OS licensing policies and pricing.  Currently, Snow Leopard Server (Mac OS X 10.6) runs $499 for an unlimited number of clients, paying nothing in the way of cals.

Claims of Apple wanting out of the enterprise market overlook the fact that the iPhone and the iPad have more than taken business and enterprise by storm.  The iPad has few rivals at this point, and the iPhone has recently overtaken RIM (the makers of Blackberry) in hardware sales, eating into the smartphone market that has been the long stronghold of Blackberry.  Needless to say, Apple has ignored neither this new market, nor the market’s prospective impact on their bottom line; we are only seeing the tip of the development iceburg floating out from Cupertino. In the decline of the Xserve, we may be seeing a completely new strategy focused on taking advantage of cloud computing and hardware virtualization, allowing greater flexibility, increased control, and ease of integration.

Am I sad to see the Xserve go? Certainly. I’ve installed a number of them and they are both rock solid and always the most attractive piece of hardware in the server rack.  But do I think that Apple is trying to get out of that enterprise market?  Absolutely not.

I saw this today, and thought that our blog subscribers might take delight in the sentiment.

Enjoy!

Post by Joe Robb