"I can't manage a network of mixed platforms."

Nobody wants to learn yet another set of proprietary management tools. But administrators don't have to resort to the proprietary to keep a mix of systems running.

The Mac shares common ground with all UNIX and POSIX systems. Management tools with open source will recompile and run on OS X -- which incorporates X Window System, VNC, and secure shell servers and clients. Microsoft offers a free download of a fast RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) client for the Mac. Parallels Desktop will run the native management tools you need for any x86 OS. You will find specific guidance from Apple and in the Mac community for wiring the standard SNMP support in OS X and Xserve RAID into commercial management solutions from HP, IBM, and others.

But make no mistake, when you have to go to the command prompt, the Mac's quirks most certainly will get in the way. If you're used to a System V UNIX or Linux OS, the locations of files, the boot sequence, and the contents of the process tree will mystify you at first. If you're accustomed to system management by custom Perl or shell scripts, your scripts will need some conditional code added to accommodate the Mac.

One quality all Mac systems share makes them a delight to manage: From the administrator's point of view, all Macs are identical. The policies you set using OS X Server are applied uniformly to PowerPC and Intel Macs, to mobile and stationary users. When you have an administrative task, such as installing an application or an update on all of the Macs on your network, Remote Desktop 3 will handle it for you. The combination of Remote Desktop, Server Manager, Server Monitor, and RAID manager is all the Mac-specific management you'll need, and it won't take you an hour to learn the whole stack.