This was originally an email posted as a reply to someone commenting on the fantasy of Apple purchasing Sun, should Apple decide they wanted a better “in” to the enterprise space. I just wanted to share my opinions with a slightly wider crowd.

First, there are rumors of Apple being keenly interested in working with Sun to port ZFS to Mac OS X. This would be Cool(TM). ZFS looks like an exciting progression in what storage should look like and act like, and finally does away with the silly differences between filesystem management and volume management. And, while HFS+ apparently “does the job”, it’s always made me a little nervous. I wonder if ZFS is cluster-safe? It’s certainly well-integrated with Solaris’s NFS subsystem.

Second, if Apple really wanted an enterprise presence, they’d actually start caring about their XServe and XServe RAID lines. Sure, they’ll happily sell you as many as you want. Having spoken at length with the person primarily responsible for managing the Turing Cluster at UIUC, however, Apple seems to have their head firmly wedged up their orifice when it comes to “enterprise support.” Reaching a human, let alone one that (a) understands the problem and (b) can even begin to fathom a solution is apparently a feat. And this, for a customer (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbanna) who dropped a cool pile of cash on 600+ XServes.

Third, nobody can make purchasing decisions based on information from Apple regarding current product lifecycles, upcoming product lines or product replacement schedules. Apple treats its “enterprise” customers just like it’s “consumer” customers. “SURPRISE! NEW PRODUCTS!”. Anyone who’s purchased an Apple only to have a newer replacement product announced a month later surely knows the pangs of buyer’s remorse that hit you, but I can only imagine what it might be like if someone buys XServes this month and two months later they’re all replaced with Intel-powered versions in Apple’s product line.

Finally, Apple’s XServe line seems to be missing some seemingly standard features in the server space. Redundant power supplies. Redundant RAID controllers in the XServe RAID. The fact that XServe RAID’s controllers each only control half the shelf. Fixing those three issues alone would make me much more interested in Apple hardware in the datacenter. Hardware RAID 0, 1, 5, “6″ and “10″ (and nested RAID groups) across all the drives in the box, not just half the shelf or an arbitrary subset of the shelf is definitely on the wishlist.

As it is right now, the XServe and XServe RAID seem best suited as servers for Mac-based workgroups, IMHO, though people seem to be having very good experiences with them as mail servers, too.