Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

New Mac Mini Server Edition

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Apple have announced a new range of Mac Mini now also including a Server addition. Pre-installed with Snow Leopard Server unlimited clients this Mac Mini boasts the powerful Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Running at 2.53GHz & 4Gb of RAM. Another interesting development is they have removed the optical (DVD) Drive & replaced it with another 500Gb 3.5 inch Hard Disk, enabling you to either mirror the dual 500Gb Hard Disks for redundancy, or use the full 1Tb storage. Like the rest of the range there are 5 USB2.0 ports and 1 Firewire 800 port giving plenty of storage options such as Drobo, HiveRaid and others such as the Lacie range.

We’re very excited by this product at Mach One & can foresee a number of deployment possibilities including areas where you may not have considered a Mac OS X Server before such as the family home. With Snow Leopard Server  you can centrally manage you families computers taking advantage features such as Parental Controls which enable you to block the more unsavory areas of the internet from you families computers along with setting other settings such as bed times and other time restrictions to ensure you family member do not spend too much time on their computers. It is also possible to restrict application access (eg make sure homework is being done, rather than playing games!)

Other Deployments could include:

• WebServer – Low cost, Low power consumption will potentially slash your hosting bills.

• FTP Server

• VPN Server

• FileMaker Server

• File Servers for small WorkGroups

• Client Management Servers

+ many other applications where you can reduce the load and bring a bit more resilience to you existing setups

Please feel free to contact one of our consultants on 01903 525100 or info@machone.co.uk to discuss your requirements.

Snow Leopard Tomorrow

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Snow Leopard Ships tomorrow boasting serveral new features, but most importantly a much leaner core as Snow Leopard will only run on Intel processor based Macintoshes.

For a full list of whats new visit:

http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/refinements/

Apple Releases Safari 4

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Apple releases Safari 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser. Available for Mac and Windows PCs and introduced as a beta in February of this year, Safari 4 features the Nitro engine which runs JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Safari 3. Safari 4 makes browsing more intuitive and enjoyable with innovative features, such as Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow, and support for modern web standards like HTML 5 and advanced CSS Effects.

Apple Unveils Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Apple unveils Mac OS X Snow Leopard, a powerful new version of the world’s most advanced operating system that includes hundreds of refinements, new core technologies, out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange and new accessibility features. Snow Leopard will ship as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users in September 2009. Apple also unveiled a Developer Preview of Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard, a full 64-bit UNIX server operating system based on open standards that is up to twice as fast as its predecessor

Apple release Mac OS 10.5.7 Update

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Apple have released the long awaited 10.5.7 update. This s more than likely going to be the last major update before the realease of Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) later this summer.

Highlights in this update are:

- Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.
- Improves Finder search results for network volumes that may not support Spotlight searching
- Includes several improvements to Directory Service and Client Management.

for a full list of updates visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3397

Direct Downloads:

10.5.7 update ( Requires 10.5.6) here

10.5.7. combo update (updates any 10.5.x) here

Apple Updates Xserves with Nehalem Processors

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

As predicted, Apple has updated its Xserve range with the Nehalem processor. This brings the range upto date with the recent new Mac Pro Range.

Aside from a considerable increase in performance, Apple have also engineered this new Xserve to be far less power hungry, meaning its better for the environment and will potentially cut your hosting bills too. This can be further enhanced by the optional 128GB Solid State Hard disk as a boot drive. This drive only consumes around 1 Watt of power where as the traditional SATA drive consumes 12-18 Watts. it also does not take up one of the 3 SATA drive bays meaning you can have upto 3TB of dedicated storage.

The new Xserve is available in Quad and 8 core models with either 6 (quad core) or 12 (8 core) RAM slots and options of 2.26GHz, 2.66GHz or 2.93GHz processor speeds

On interesting thing I’ve picked up on the tech specs page is the quote:

System supports up to 32GB in Mac OS X Server v10.5

Presumably 32Gb is a limit on 10.5, maybe snow leopard, 10.6 will offer full support for upto 48Gb RAM.

Skype now available for iPhone

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Available as a free download from the App Store the popular internet telephony app Skype.

Voice calls will only work over a Wifi network not via your cellular data network. I would imagine this was to placate the network providers such as O2 & AT&T etc.

Seems to work pretty well on our network here, there is obvioulsy no video support as the iPhone doesn’t have a forward facing camera (yet….)

Quad Core Nehalem Mac Pros do support upto 16Gb RAM?

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Despite the technical specification from Apple saying the quad core Nehalem processor based Mac Pro only supports up to 2Gb RAM chips, a U.S reseller says they have successfully tested a 4GB Chip*

*Source Mac Rumors Forum

**Mach One has yet to put this to the test, but will edit this post as soon we are able.

United Digital PCIe RAID first Look

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

So last week we took delivery of our first United Digital 9116 PCIe RAID.

Unlike traditional RAIDs that connect via either a SCSI or Fibre card the United Digital 91xx series connect directly to the PCIe bus of the host Mac. This pretty much eliminates bottlenecks caused by traditional connectivity methods.

I like the design of this raid. it has a very simple easy to use web management console, easy to set-up email notifications for if things go wrong.

The system I was testing was a 9116 a 16 bay subsystem comprising of 8 x 750Gb SATA Hard Disks. This was connected to a 2.8GHz Quad Core Mac Pro running Mac OS 10.5.6 & 6Gb RAM.

Using Xbench the results were astounding: I was getting a sustained read speed of 669 MB/sec & sustained write speed of 470 MB/sec. I compared this against an Xserve RAID (7 x 250Gb HDD @ RAID 5) which could only muster read/ write speeds of around 140Mb/sec.

With performance figures like these, couple this with 10Gb Ethernet we could potentially have a serious lower cost rival to Xsan systems.

United Digital 9116 PCIe RAID & Apple Mac Pro