Review: Snow Leopard Server

Snow Leopard, briefly announced yesterday by Steve jobs, will of course be available as a Server version. In addition to the new technologies already described today, among them Open CL and Grand Central, Snow Leopard Server will feature some specific services which look very promising:
- iCal Server 2, to improve the collaboration as well as support push notification (the server sends the notification of a new meeting, and not the remote client which has to connect back to the server to get updates).
- Podcast Producer 2, with simultaneous transcoding of 2 videos to allow "Picture in Picture"
- Mail server has also been updated, improved; with several thousand simultaneous connection possible as well as new functions such as support for "out of office" message etc...
- Address Book Server: based on a new format named CardDAV, corresponding to CalDAV for iCal, it will allow a better and easier management for the network administrator than using a LDAP database.
- ZFS: The new feature, already announced with Leopard, then postponed and partially implemented (in read mode only), will be fully available in Mac O X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. As a reminder, ZFS is a file system implemented by Sun in Solaris. It brings true innovation in file system thanks to its 128-bit foundation (compared to 32-bit for HFS+), it push the limit of files and volume further to 16 exa-bytes (in other words 16 billion of billion bytes), and the manageable number of files to 2^48. In addition, integrated functions are very interesting: automatic correction of corrupted data, resize a volume on the fly, etc.
This is only a first analysis at the data provided by Apple regarding Snow Leopard Server, but for sure developers will soon have more information in their hands.