Apple Developing Narrower, Rackmountable Mac Pro Prototypes?

[sunspot42]

Replacing the desk make add 5% to the total cost of the new computer

It's not a desk, it's a wardrobe, and it holds a ton of stuff besides the computer. Replacing it would cost at least $1,000, which is about half as much as a Mac Pro costs.

In addition to which, it would be a huge PITA to replace it.

The Mac Pro is oversized for 99% of its target users. And with Thunderbolt now available, those few folks who need more room for expansion can simply buy and use external expansion boxes without paying any performance penalty.

 

[FluJunkie]

And how do you operate it? A server can be accessed from a workstation but a Mac Pro IS a workstation, it's not a server. It's not a logical step. I have a professional photographer in the family, with a Mac Pro. He needs to load his RAWs onto his Mac for post processing. How to do this if that Mac is in another room, in a rack Very inconvenient if you ask me.

It is trivial, in say my case, to SSH into a "workstation" type Mac Pro, say "Noble Mac Pro, run this really computational intensive code, I'll check back in a bit" and then SSH the output back to another machine when it's done. No muss, no fuss.

Now imagine you have bunches of workstations...

 

[CIA]

Not to sound harsh or anything, but maybe you guys should be charging more for your services. The way you described how much work you guys are doing over there, you should be able to afford a new MacPro for everyone there...and maybe a couple grip trucks...

Well, we get a bonus week of paid vacation for working 15 hour days 3 weeks straight. Most of the production done is for us, not contract work. We are the only (local) station in town for the festival, so it would be stupid not to bust our ass to showcase our stuff to the world. We sell a lot of ads, but at the same time, it's still local TV when it comes down to it.

 

[seek3r]

It is trivial, in say my case, to SSH into a "workstation" type Mac Pro, say "Noble Mac Pro, run this really computational intensive code, I'll check back in a bit" and then SSH the output back to another machine when it's done. No muss, no fuss.

Now imagine you have bunches of workstations...

In my end of things we usually call that a cluster

 

[chedda]

Wow-rant

How utterly retarded does one have to be to get to the point where they put workstations on top of the desk instead of on the floor where they belong? Do you really need to put your Apple computer next to your overpriced, glossy Apple display to prove yourself?

I have my mac pro on my desk i suppose it depends how big your desk is ? It's silent anyhow and well ventilated on top plus it doesn't fill up with dust and cat hair so quickly up on top ! Oh i have 2 30" matte cinema displays and it does look rather good.

I do not feel retarded or the need to prove myself, i don't really understand where your comment came from. I use my setup for rendering architectural visualizations.

 

[JollyJoeJoe]

doubtful, this is a key switcher market... it would be crazy to axe the very thing that will continue to switch the PC builders/gamers over the next 5 years... this is a key ingredient to apple taking the industry over with time.

Apple will not take the desktop industry over, at least not whilst it's using intel processors and chipsets and charging far more for them than other vendors.

You are essentially now using a PC with EFI firmware and OSX operating system. The only advantage over a hackintosh is that it's all fine tuned, modified and tested under one roof together with Apples software and of course styled with a modern, warm, minimalist form using quality materials but which does not leave any room for custom modding, water cooling, tri-quad SLI\X-Fire etc that PC modders crave.

In my opinion with virtualization age starting and conventions/standards now being more robust we are coming to a time where it's going to be all "same ****, different logo and GUI" and the cheaper, more feature rich option will win out.

The desktop market has been exhausted and its time passed anywhere, so now it's all about mobile and portable computing.
Nokia is partnering with Ms, those are two big, strong boys right there and will give everyone a run for their money. Add to that Microsofts kinect technology and you have new ways of controlling PC's, HTPC's and even mobiles. I have a feeling we're in for a surprise. Apple had/has its prime time with the ipod, iphone, ipad but now the innovation chip has changed it seems.

 

[machewcoy]

Hrm.. When I hear "Mac Pro", I think of a giant behemoth of a computer, with super internals for crazy processing power for graphics design or whatever your poison may be.. Just to be clear, I'm well aware that there are cheaper ways of building a crazy computer that would put a Mac Pro to shame, but I'm just focusing on the Mac Pro here.. When I think of something rack-mountable, I think of servers, which leads me to think of the XServe and not a smaller Mac Pro (though, having the said giant powerhouse Mac Pro act as a server would be pretty cool, but I don't know how servers work so I may be wrong).. I'm no professional at anything, just a plain college student with a basic consumer outlook on things..

 

[chaosbringer]

Some designs changes i'd like to see (all the rest i'm fine with):

- Dust filters
- Thunderbolt ports, front and back (instead of one of the firewire ports)
- Usb 3.0 replacing usb 2.0 ports
- PSU on bottom to keep it cool
- HD's on bottom to keep them cool too
- At least one dedicated SSD bay

 

[Full of Win]

How utterly retarded does one have to be to get to the point where they put workstations on top of the desk instead of on the floor where they belong? Do you really need to put your Apple computer next to your overpriced, glossy Apple display to prove yourself?

Have you seen the cable length of the 24 inch ACD? Its so short that you have to have a desktop on the desk and not the ground.

 

[KnightWRX]

Redundant power supplies are generally not a standard feature for most x86 servers sold. It isn't a must (requirement); it is an optional feature need if want to sell to the relatively small subset of the market that wants them. (e.g, none of Google's, Microsoft's ,etc search/cloud servers have dual power supplies and they number in the many, many thousands. )

Citation needed.

Even our Active-Active cluster boxes have redundant power supplies plugged into seperate electrical circuits and wired to independant UPSes, never mind our Active-Passive cluster solutions...

The fact is, most data centers do go for maximum redundancies without single points of failure on the hardware side.

When you have a massively parallele solution with custom software that is built to run on non-redundant hardware like Google built with their search engine, yeah, you can afford to skimp on hardware. They don't care if 1 node out of their 10000 fails, and the software doesn't see the impact. But that 1 specialised custom application is not an industry standard and is far from the norm in building data centers.

It isn't necessary for a rackable Mac Pro. The objective would not to be a perfect replacement for the XServe in call case just some. All the Mac Pro has to do to remain healthy is add some , not all , of the old XServe buyers to those already buying it as a workstation. Being rackable is just an optional feature to slightly expand the market. Not the primary objective.

The fact is, the Xserve wasn't selling well and it had all the server features. A rackable Mac Pro would sell even less to those Xserve buyers. Forget redundant power supplies if you don't believe in them, just lack of LOM or hot-swap drives is a killer by itself.

And seriously, Thunderbolt ? Host based storage ? Forget that, to get into my data center, you need multi-path Fiber Channel. Thank god at least Apple recognizes that and offers the option on the Mac Pro. Thunderbolt is not a SAN technology and it's not replacing SANs anytime soon. I don't want to manage hundreds of storage arrays for each hosts. I want to manage 1 unified storage array and then present LUNs to my hosts as needed. That way, I get better distribution of my existing storage and can even manage some over-provisionning depending on the technology I use.

A lot of people here never worked with enterprise-grade systems. A rackable Mac Pro would at best be used as someone else stated, to rack along video/audio equipement in a studio. Not to rack into a data center.

 

[woodbine]

How utterly retarded does one have to be to get to the point where they put workstations on top of the desk instead of on the floor where they belong? Do you really need to put your Apple computer next to your overpriced, glossy Apple display to prove yourself?

uuumm...yes I do want my MP on the desk. On the floor is where all the **** and dust is.

 

[Kenrik]

Citation needed.

Even our Active-Active cluster boxes have redundant power supplies plugged into seperate electrical circuits and wired to independant UPSes, never mind our Active-Passive cluster solutions...

The fact is, most data centers do go for maximum redundancies without single points of failure on the hardware side.

When you have a massively parallele solution with custom software that is built to run on non-redundant hardware like Google built with their search engine, yeah, you can afford to skimp on hardware. They don't care if 1 node out of their 10000 fails, and the software doesn't see the impact. But that 1 specialised custom application is not an industry standard and is far from the norm in building data centers.






The fact is, the Xserve wasn't selling well and it had all the server features. A rackable Mac Pro would sell even less to those Xserve buyers. Forget redundant power supplies if you don't believe in them, just lack of LOM or hot-swap drives is a killer by itself.

And seriously, Thunderbolt ? Host based storage ? Forget that, to get into my data center, you need multi-path Fiber Channel. Thank god at least Apple recognizes that and offers the option on the Mac Pro. Thunderbolt is not a SAN technology and it's not replacing SANs anytime soon. I don't want to manage hundreds of storage arrays for each hosts. I want to manage 1 unified storage array and then present LUNs to my hosts as needed. That way, I get better distribution of my existing storage and can even manage some over-provisionning depending on the technology I use.

A lot of people here never worked with enterprise-grade systems. A rackable Mac Pro would at best be used as someone else stated, to rack along video/audio equipement in a studio. Not to rack into a data center.

Well I don't think anyone actually USED the Xserve in datacenters anyway... Why would YOU? Seriously you don't need a boutique operating system on a server that's on 24/7/365 serving html/php/mysql with the only downtime is an occasional reboot for software updates.

The people who used Xserves had a few of them at most and could not even justify racking them. Most Xserves ended up on desks or maybe thrown next to a bunch of PC servers in a companies IT department for the "crazy Mac guys" in advertising/production. Really if you look at the Xserve in general you see the only real penetration was in the TV Station/Video Editing/Movie/Education/Advertising fields.. Not "Data Centers"

So a 3u Mac Pro will work just fine in the TV Station/Video Editing/Movie/Education/Advertising "Server Rooms" where they can fill up a rack with their 10, 3u servers and do what they need to.

 

[Kenrik]

uuumm...yes I do want my MP on the desk. On the floor is where all the **** and dust is.

Agreed.. Under a desk it has less airflow, more dirt and crap.

Actually I prefer it being under the desk because it looks cleaner but it is NOT better for the computer. I don't know what that guy is smoking.

 

[KnightWRX]

Well I don't think anyone actually USED the Xserve in datacenters anyway... Why would YOU? Seriously you don't need a boutique operating system on a server that's on 24/7/365 serving html/php/mysql with the only downtime is an occasional reboot for software updates.

The people who used Xserves had a few of them at most and could not even justify racking them. Most Xserves ended up on desks or maybe thrown next to a bunch of PC servers in a companies IT department for the "crazy Mac guys" in advertising/production. Really if you look at the Xserve in general you see the only real penetration was in the TV Station/Video Editing/Movie/Education/Advertising fields.. Not "Data Centers"

So a 3u Mac Pro will work just fine in the TV Station/Video Editing/Movie/Education/Advertising "Server Rooms" where they can fill up a rack with their 10, 3u servers and do what they need to.

I don't think your post is quite accurate. For large deployments of Mac clients, the Xserve was a wonderful integrated management solution and it fit in the data center along with all the other servers uses for other purposes. No one really wants homogeneous environnements in a data center and Xserve served as diversity, filling their niche well.

Use them to serve HTML/PHP/MySQL ? A waste of an Xserve. Use them for SUS, netboot, Opendirectory ? Wonderful. Also, many of those TV Station/Video Editing/Movie/Education/Advertising fields have data centers in case you didn't know. It's not like everyone operates out of a closet.

Heck, a few lifetimes ago when I worked small businesses, we were selling racks and properly wiring and racking systems for businesses with 50 employees and 5 servers. We were adding in UPSes and redundancy. I built a site-to-site VPN between our own surveillance network and everyone of our customer's networks to monitor services remotely using a Cisco based solution. Yes, about 1k$ worth of networking equipment for small business that did nothing else than check that their filesystems weren't full or that the database server didn't go down. And they paid monthly fees on that of that for the service.

Size of a business means nothing, it's the value of the data that a business manages that dictates their server needs. If a company has 5 employees but their data is worth over 10 million $, they aren't going to host it on a 1k$ PC thrown in a corner with a failing fan on the CPU. They are going to invest in a proper solution.

You have to have worked in IT to understand the implications here. This is not a Xserve replacement and if Apple goes through with a "rackable" Mac Pro, it's not going to be billed as an Xserve replacement nor are the buyers that bought Xserves going to be using that. It's not like you couldn't just use OS X Server on Mac Pros before Apple introduced the joke of the "Mac Pro Server". The thing already existed.

 

[Ryth]

Hrm.. When I hear "Mac Pro", I think of a giant behemoth of a computer, with super internals for crazy processing power for graphics design or whatever your poison may be..

Actually, you can get by with a mid/high level iMac now for most graphic design needs (photoshop, illustrator, etc) these days and even average video editing needs

MacPros are really now for higher end video and 3D applications or those that really need to get their work done fast and rendered fast.

Funny though, one of the 3D companies that works in our building actually bought high end iMacs last year and they use them for Maya and they work great they said...I think we're at a plateau for a lot of apps in what you can do with them and the latest gen processors in the iMacs, MBPros are somewhat overkill for a lot of people already.

Just to be clear, I'm well aware that there are cheaper ways of building a crazy computer that would put a Mac Pro to shame, but I'm just focusing on the Mac Pro here..

Actually, if you go blow for blow, building a PC that has the same specs (and that means same specs across the board down to the minor details), they really aren't that far off. Some magazine did that one time and they were within $300 of each other.

 

[macindork]

Citation needed.

Even our Active-Active cluster boxes have redundant power supplies plugged into seperate electrical circuits and wired to independant UPSes, never mind our Active-Passive cluster solutions...

The fact is, most data centers do go for maximum redundancies without single points of failure on the hardware side.

When you have a massively parallele solution with custom software that is built to run on non-redundant hardware like Google built with their search engine, yeah, you can afford to skimp on hardware. They don't care if 1 node out of their 10000 fails, and the software doesn't see the impact. But that 1 specialised custom application is not an industry standard and is far from the norm in building data centers.

The fact is, the Xserve wasn't selling well and it had all the server features. A rackable Mac Pro would sell even less to those Xserve buyers. Forget redundant power supplies if you don't believe in them, just lack of LOM or hot-swap drives is a killer by itself.

And seriously, Thunderbolt ? Host based storage ? Forget that, to get into my data center, you need multi-path Fiber Channel. Thank god at least Apple recognizes that and offers the option on the Mac Pro. Thunderbolt is not a SAN technology and it's not replacing SANs anytime soon. I don't want to manage hundreds of storage arrays for each hosts. I want to manage 1 unified storage array and then present LUNs to my hosts as needed. That way, I get better distribution of my existing storage and can even manage some over-provisionning depending on the technology I use.

A lot of people here never worked with enterprise-grade systems. A rackable Mac Pro would at best be used as someone else stated, to rack along video/audio equipement in a studio. Not to rack into a data center.

I work for a school district and even we go for redundant PS when possible, especially on our ESX boxes. Believe it or not though we are still gigabit to our SAN and while Fiber Channel may be awesome in this scenario do you not think Thunderbolt would have the throughput for say, a DAS box? Then again, we aren't as demanding in our environment. ESX is nice in this way because its all of our servers (well, almost all virtualized) and one Equallogic.

 

[firestarter]

Actually, you can get by with a mid/high level iMac now for most graphic design needs (photoshop, illustrator, etc) these days and even average video editing needs

Not if you care about color management. While Apple continues its love affair with shiny screens, creatives need an alternative.

 

[timbloom]

Go back and read my post please...thoroughly.

I am referring to the wider market. Sure, you manage 600+ Mac workstations. But on the grand scale of things, thats not worth anything to Apple.

Put it this way:

Why spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on redevelopment for an audience of, lets say 50,000 customers when you can spend the same amount on an audience of 1million+ customers. See my point? The server market for Apple is clearly not worth it. Yes, it sucks big time for people like yourself who rely on it, but at the end of the day Apple will focus on products that bring in cash, not products that break even at best.

Have you ever heard the phrase "all your eggs in one basket"? Diversification at Apple is very needed at the moment. Half of their profit comes from the sale of one device. Say that the iPhone 6 was a flop, imagine having to tell your investors you're losing 50% projected profit nearly overnight. Something like that can crush a company. You want diversification, and apple has the resources currently to really invest in some fairly stable markets such as enterprise. Currently their inroads are IOS in the enterprise, if they can leverage that to sell servers for management it will feed back on itself and support more mutual growth between mac and iOS in these coveted markets. Apple should have struck harder in this area during the vista debacle, but their mac team brushed off the opportunity.

A machine like this with dual purposes is a godsend for us. It means apple only needs production lines for one case, and we get a more flexible server and workstation in one. True hot swap bays on a mac?! F-yeah! I can convince my clients to hook up a rackmount mac pro server in their data center or server closet. LOM is nice, but I don't think it's going to be a make or break deal in most businesses. I don't see why it either couldn't be an optional module with the Server preconfig, or on all of them with the prices apple charges.

The server market is the backbone of the business market. Macs will be niche in enterprise as long as the backbone isn't there, and stronger than last time.

 

[Ryth]

Not if you care about color management. While Apple continues its love affair with shiny screens, creatives need an alternative.

Considering the market is moving towards digital distribution on these shiny screens, color management is going by the wayside, especially with a lack of standards now in HD/cable TV.

Also, it's called having a second calibrated monitor for TV like all good post houses should have.

Been doing creative for 15+ years. Apple's shiny screens over the last years haven't caused us to miss a beat.

 

[SockRolid]

Will Apple use it in their NC data center?

Last I heard, Apple was going to use non-Apple gear in their NC data center. That was just a rumor of course. But if there really are rackable Mac Pros on the way, I wonder if Apple could use them in NC...

 

[Ommid]

doubtful, this is a key switcher market... it would be crazy to axe the very thing that will continue to switch the PC builders/gamers over the next 5 years... this is a key ingredient to apple taking the industry over with time.

Agree with this, not likely.

 

[KnightWRX]

Believe it or not though we are still gigabit to our SAN and while Fiber Channel may be awesome in this scenario do you not think Thunderbolt would have the throughput for say, a DAS box?

Direct Attached Storage is a pain to manage : "Hey, XY server needs more storage space... oh wait, the array is full, we need to purchase a new array for it... too bad we can't use YZ's array which only has 2 bays occupied...".

Centralized storage arrays with LUNs solves all of these issues. Running out of storage ? Present a new LUN and just plug it in to whatever volume manager you use and grow your existing filesystem, all with 0 downtime or even having to physically connect anything to the box.

For data centers, Thunderbolt is a non-contender.

 

[linuxcooldude]

Half of their profit comes from the sale of one device. Say that the iPhone 6 was a flop, imagine having to tell your investors you're losing 50% projected profit nearly overnight.

I would not think it would be fair comparing cell phones to computers as their designed for much different markets. As more adults own cell phones then computers you would expect higher profits off of it. Apple was doing quite well even before they entered the phone market.

A more realistic comparison would be phone to phone or computer to computer.

 

[MacFly123]

Seriously? We also do full DVD high end hollywood type authoring at my facility (have been for 10+ Years) and Blu-Ray authoring and we have no need for internal optical super drives.

You guys seriously need to unhinge yourselves from those internal drives...lol

Why should I just have to buy another additional piece of hardware that is ugly and not integrated just to be able to do what my clients want?

Wait till the 2012 update then axe them forever! I don't care, but this year is a bit premature. The online delivery ecosystem still has a lot to work out! I am all for the future, but we are not quite there yet.

 

[planetdom]

I dont understand why some people say the mac pro is for pro users only?when i wanted to buy a Mac i brought a Mac Pro because i didnt like the IMac because of the glossy screen and the way it is all in one unit if the screen packs up then bye bye mac,then i thought of the Mac Mini,that was a no because it doesnt have enough power...

Then i dont understand why some people have to say the mac pro is a old design ok so the out side hasnt changed much maybe a few things like an extra optical drive and different ports,but the inside has changed a lot compared to the older mac pros much more cleaner than befour...

I think it would be a shame to completely changed the design of the Mac Pro as it still is far much better than any PC design i have ever seen,maybe make the air holes smaller but thats all,i think the Mac Pro design still has a lot of life in it........I am not a pro user........