Anyone using OS X Server in a design/publishing environment?

[destalk]

Anyone using OS X Server in a design/publishing environment?

I'd be interested in your experiences. Especially with regard to your general studio setup, size of user base, disk space, networking bandwidth, software compatibility (especially working with Quark and Photoshop files directly on the network server).

Thanks in advance. :)

[destalk]

Oh, and if you are in a mixed Mac OS X, OS, Windows and Linux environment, I'd be particularly interested.

[nobbythedonkey]

Oh, and if you are in a mixed Mac OS X, OS, Windows and Linux environment, I'd be particularly interested.

in the past iv worked with what you are asking, the only thing i would recommend is go for either fibre or gigabit networking it makes working with the files alot quicker

[rhoskins]

Hi,

I'm currently an admin at a college newspaper in the midwest. And for the past year I've been admin for the school's journalism and mass comm department (they're separate organizations).

So, OS X in a design/publishing environment.. is great! Brief overview of the paper's setup (actually, it's the newspaper and yearbook): Power Mac Dual 550 running 10.2.8 (haven't had time to migrate to our Xserve G5 yet), Xserve RAID half-terabyte, and a wide spectrum of Mac boxes, almost all running OS X 10.3.6. We netboot all the machines except the photogs' machines and some of the office machines. All together there are 40-50 computers. Since it's a university building, it's wired with 100mbps ethernet. Bandwidth hasn't been a problem, but we do have two network cables going to the server.

The server itself does all the file sharing, web and email hosting. Since it's so old, the server does slow down a bit, but the Xserve shouldn't break a sweat.

Netboot machines have Adobe CS products, and Quark 6. Since they're netbooted, they pretty much have to work with pages and files directly on the server. This hasn't been a problem, but occasionally a Quark file will become corrupted. Ditto usually fixes this. Users connect to a variety of mount points on the server.

I highly recommend investing in an Xserve RAID. It's amazing how fast data will accumulate, and the total redundancy helps me sleep easier.

We still have some OS 9 machines, but they just do their own thing. They connect to the server, etc..
Oh, and backup is done on tape (not my policy).
---
With the Journalism dept., we have a cross-platform beast. An Xserve G4 does all file sharing a little web sharing. It has 1.25gb of memory and dual 120gb drives and never breaks a sweat. Backups are done over firewire with Retrospect (great software) to an old G4. Web hosting is done on a linux box, which is backed up by another linux box. Very soon we'll be migrating the sites over to the Xserve.

Machine breakdown goes something like this: about 75 lab computers running OS X 10.3.6. One lab of G5s, one of G4s, one of G3s, and one mixed G3/G4. Faculty computers are mostly PC, with quite a few G4s and a couple of G5s. We have mount points for the Faculty and classes, etc.. and have to have windows file sharing turned on for the PCs but we haven't had any problems whatsoever.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope I answered your questions. It was sort of a general set of questions :P

[destalk]

Hi

Thanks for that, some really useful responses (and apologies for the delay in responding - it's been busy here).