By Chester Chen

THINK of a computer server and images of big black boxes with hundreds of spaghetti-like wires come to mind.

Size and looks aside, you also have to worry about the high cost of licensing and hiring staff to maintain it.

Apple's Mac Mini and OS X Snow Leopard Server does away with such hassles, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses with small budgets.

If you are unfamiliar with Apple's Mac Mini, it is a gizmo that is smaller than a shoe box.

Crammed inside are a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM and 1TB of storage. There is also Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity; the latter can be used as a router as well.

To complete the package, you need only a keyboard, mouse and an LCD monitor that has a DVI (Digital Video Interface) to connect to the Mac Mini.

Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server comes with tools that act as a central repository so that files from photos to video can be stored there and different people can pull whatever files they want from it.

However, before you can enjoy that convenience, you need to set up the server. Apple has done an excellent job of making the set-up easy and it took me less than five minutes to get the job done.

Administering the server starts with a nice snapshot of your system on the Server Admin window overview. You can add users, create file sharing and assign permissions on who gets to share what.

The range of services you enable is also a simple task accessed via the Server Preferences application. Once configured, I tested the basic set of applications - Wiki, Blogs, Calendar and Web Mail by accessing the server using a Windows 7 network connected desktop.

The experience was seamless and if I had not set up the server myself, I would not even have known that the pages I accessed had been served up from a Mac.

Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server is cost-effective because the licensing for client access is unlimited. So hundreds of users can tap into the server at no extra cost to the user.

Some of the OS X Snow Leopard Server applications can work with only a similar operating system client - Apple Mac OS X. One such application is PodCast Producer 2, which alone may be worth the price of this little box.

For other computers, there is still a lot of generic connectivity for client access or tasks such as FTP, e-mail, Wiki Web, blog and file sharing.

Final say

If you are looking for a small server or Network Address Storage solution to serve as a hub for your files, the Apple Mac Mini with OS X Snow Leopard Server is a worthwhile consideration.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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