The other day I was looking into Zend Server and I was wondering why I would use this? OK, they say it's all tested and mission critical and Enterprise ready etc. But to me that's just the marketing department talking.
Is anyone out there using this product and if so can you share your experiences with it and maybe you could also elaborate on the reason on why you choose this product for your application(s).
Did you find any real benefits to using Zend server?
I have been using Zend Platform(I know you were asking about Zend Server, I'm getting there) and have been very keen on the error reporting tool which you also get with Zend Server.
Whenever an error occurs or an exception is thrown Zend Server stores as much information about it as it can(like for instance what request parameters were being used, where the error occured, time, error message, stack trace, etc.). Also slow script execution is being reported to you.
I really prefer getting those kind of error messages over customers saying something like: "The site is not working. Please fix it".
When using Zend Server in conjunction with Zend Studio it's pretty neat that Zend Debugger comes already preinstalled(but you could have installed it yourself as well).
Also it comes with a php-java-bridge(your java classes can be used in PHP) but I didn't need this.
If you're having a php-based error reporting solution in your web application already or have no use for this nor for the java bridge I'd say that it doesn't really make a difference if you are using Zend Server over your own apache installation(as long as you know how to configure it right).
At least that's my opinion/experience.
I've been using the Developer Edition of Zend Platform which is free. If I had to pay for Zend Platform/Server I don't think I would be using it. But that really depends on the project.