Okay, so if Apple can't count on getting vaulted into a prime position in the enterprise market through an IBM buyout, it'll just have to go it alone, right? Well, as it turns out, that might not be all that lousy a fate. Sure, it's been well over a year since Apple got serious about big business sales and created an actual enterprise division and everything, and the company still doesn't have a whole lot to show for it, but c'mon, these things take time-- especially in an economy in which corporate IT spending is probably still in the proverbial toilet. But the Xserve is slowly but surely catching on; as faithful viewer frozen tundra noted a couple of weeks ago, IT-Enquirer reported that Gartner Dataquest described Apple's Xserve sales as "having above-average growth" in the second quarter and year-over-year growth of a pleasingly plump 119 percent in the third. No, it's not a Mac in every cubicle, but it's a foot in the door.

And it just gets better. You may have heard a couple of days ago that, as CNET reports, Oracle (an enterprise market player if ever there was one) issued a white paper "endorsing the Xserve RAID as part of an initiative to cut storage costs." The company is apparently planning to use 50 to 100 terabytes' worth of Xserve RAIDs in place of "pricier Fibre Channel-based disk arrays" because they cost "about three times lower" per megabyte and "performance is excellent." (Here's hoping the savings aren't just because Steve Jobs cut a great deal for Oracle CEO, former Apple board member, and bestest buddy Larry Ellison.) Given how much of the world's big business relies on Oracle databases, the company's endorsement is likely to give Apple some much-needed street cred among IT buyers looking for cheap, fast database storage.

But that's not all; Oracle is also planning to release a Mac OS X version of its 10g software "sometime before the end of the year" (so, within about three weeks), which will be another feather in Apple's enterprise cap. Meanwhile, for businesses who need cheap, fast storage for files other than monstrous databases, Apple itself still claims to be on schedule to ship its own storage area network software, dubbed Xsan, "later this fall" (in other words, within about two weeks). Whereas Xserve RAIDs reportedly cost three times lower than Fibre Channel RAIDs, at $999 per server, Xsan costs "about a third of that of rival SAN technology." At least a few budget-conscious IT directors must surely be taking notice of the ridiculous cost savings that Apple is offering.

Toss all that together with Think Secret's report of an official Xsan certification program for resellers and January speed bumps of Xserves to at least 2.3 GHz (like the custom units comprising the new and improved System X) or even as high as 2.5 GHz, and hey, there's plenty of good news for Apple's enterprise prospects, even without a looming IBM buyout in the cards. And when enough IT folks take advantage of the Xserve/Xsan cost savings that Apple's dangling in front of them like a carrot on a stick, there may well be a "halo effect" as they realize just how good and interoperable Apple's products are, leading to increased purchases of desktop Macs for the cubicle jockeys. Xserve: it's the iPod of the enterprise world! At least, we certainly hope it will be.