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Apple Discontinues Xserve, Only Available Until January 31st

Yes this is stupid

peskaa said:
Nooooo :(

I manage a bank of 20 Xserves at work, and I love them. We were waiting on a refresh to update them all as well. Telling me to replace with Mac Pros simply doesn't work - wrong form factor, no redundancy.

Boo hiss.
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I manage a bunch of xserves as well and I agree I usually love Apple but this is a stupid decision, I was just getting hopeful that they were doing the right moves to enter the enterprise market but this just killed it, I don't know what I am going to do when it comes time to upgrade, mac pros have not redundant power supplies, etc. This is stupid and insane. I guess Linux backend infrastructure is in my companies future.
 
jonohayes said:
Apple still has plans for OS X Server Lion, Xsan and Final Cut Server also.
i have an email from Eric Zelenka at Apple. (attached)


i think this is good news, i hope apple has deal with Xen Server & VMware.
virtualization is the way forward.



hope your not pissed i posted this email Eric. but the the community needed some reinsurance.
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Supporting the software is one thing, but we want decent, industry-standard rackmount hardware to put it on ;)
 
I find this news deeply disappointing. I manage several Xserves for various small businesses and I wonder what I'll replace them with when the time comes. A Mac Pro sure won't fit in a server closet and a Mini is just not robust enough hardware to trust the job to. Redundant power supplies, LOM, and fiber channel are musts.

Maybe a third-party will release a Mac 10.7 Server-ready 1U offering and Apple will sue them out of existence.

Actually, this makes me wonder if Apple will discontinue their server OS after 10.7. As for the reassurance from Eric, why the hell should we believe that? Of course that's the answer they'll give as long as they're still selling it.
 
jonohayes said:
Apple still has plans for OS X Server Lion, Xsan and Final Cut Server also.
i have an email from Eric Zelenka at Apple. (attached)


i think this is good news, i hope apple has deal with Xen Server & VMware.
virtualization is the way forward.



hope your not pissed i posted this email Eric. but the the community needed some reinsurance.
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That is good news of sorts, and thank you for sharing. But just what do they expect us to run it on would be my question. The Mini and Pro as "Servers" means that they are wasting their time on development of a Server OS at all as far I am concerned. There is zero chance that I will use ether a Mini or Pro as an enterprise server.

James.
 
minjche said:
I've barely worked with servers, so you're absolutely right that I'm no server expert. But I'm not weighing in on the server itself, I'm weighing in on the chicken-little reaction of so many people in this thread.
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OK so lets say for a living you drive cars, Apple cars. Those Apple cars need specialized Apple Drivers and a Specialized Apple Road. So you work for a Taxi company that built 25 million dollars worth of Apple roads and you are hired to drive the Apple car. Lets say two weeks later, after Apple came in and said they have plans on doing more things with there Cars, Apple discontinues Apple cars.

Wouldn't you be a little worried about not only your investment but perhaps your livelihood? This isn't chicken little chief, this is real life.

BrotherBeagle said:
I saw some of this conversation earlier, but not the build up for this; so excuse me for stepping in somewhat blind...

Casper/JSS creates a ssh account while imaging and manages all administrative processes via said account through a bundle of apps installed for the purpose of administration.

I will admit, the whole thing is pretty slick -- especially when you add in the ongoing client management features, ability to schedule updates or app deployment via policies, ability to scope network segments, utilize smart lists, create dynamic install configurations and so much more.

Deploystudio is a really fantastic tool for deploying images. Casper is a really fantastic tool for deploying images and then handling ongoing administration (including scheduling reimaging) down the road.

I'm currently handling 54 schools across a fair sized city (our Mac population is minuscule compared to our Windows population... 1000 odd Macs to 14000 odd Dells), and handling it all on a 1st gen Xserve as our OD master, a G5 Mac Pro as a second OD box, an '08 Xserve for JSS, MySQL, AFP and some other tools and a new Xserve for Netboot and SUS.

The new Xserve was just racked in the last two weeks (so I could split netboot and SUS off the initial). But that single Xserve and I refreshed 70% of our Macs this summer and deployed close to 100 new Macbooks by ourselves.

Not bad...

Back to the subject at hand... I'm really hoping Apple is about to open virtualization on vanilla hardware. 'Cause there's slim to no chance of dragging Mac Pros in the server room (that G5 is unwanted as it is)...
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My last company we did a Mac refresh with 500 Macs over a 3 day period. It was as easy as pointing and clicking.
 
jonohayes said:
Apple still has plans for OS X Server Lion, Xsan and Final Cut Server also.

i think this is good news, i hope apple has deal with Xen Server & VMware.
virtualization is the way forward.

hope your not pissed i posted this email Eric. but the the community needed some reinsurance.
Click to expand...

Yeah, right. Plans to cancel?.. :rolleyes:

It won't be right away, but it's coming. I give it 5 years, and those left here will be discussing iOS11. ;)
 
jonohayes said:
Apple still has plans for OS X Server Lion, Xsan and Final Cut Server also.

i think this is good news, i hope apple has deal with Xen Server & VMware.
virtualization is the way forward.

hope your not pissed i posted this email Eric. but the the community needed some reinsurance.
Click to expand...
So given that the email link is gone, should we not be reassured?
 
They need to allow it to run as a VM anyway

All medium and large organizations are switching to virtualization platforms anyway, rack-mount servers for each application are a thing of the past. Apple needs to work with VMware and allow OS X to run on other hardware. If they did that, they could sell it for $999 each and would make a lot more money from their server product.

Hopefully OS X Server is here to stay. It does have some nice capabilities.
 
jonohayes said:
Apple still has plans for OS X Server Lion, Xsan and Final Cut Server also.
Click to expand...

That's the one saving grace with this. I'd hardly call it a "good thing", but I have to imagine that there must be some kind of unseen "plan" with this, that 10.7 Server is not just being built solely for Mac mini and Pro towers. A Mac mini running OSXS is a "hobby" server, but even out of the datacenter, the Pro is not desirable even for FCS. It's a pro client end, but there's now this gap that not these things, not just OSXS, will fall through. Or else sit on top of.... something. The timing seems off though - I can imagine changes in 10.7 Server that will support virtualization beyond the current Mac-on-Mac solutions, but discontinuing the Xserve as soon as January seems premature.

Or perhaps there actually is not such a plan.
 
wildmac said:
Yeah, right. Plans to cancel?.. :rolleyes:

It won't be right away, but it's coming. I give it 5 years, and those left here will be discussing iOS11. ;)
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I don't believe a lick anyone at Apple says. They are so secretive with things they are know to give bogus info to each other just so things don't get out.
 
Mattie Num Nums said:
OK so lets say for a living you drive cars, Apple cars. Those Apple cars need specialized Apple Drivers and a Specialized Apple Road. So you work for a Taxi company that built 25 million dollars worth of Apple roads and you are hired to drive the Apple car. Lets say two weeks later, after Apple came in and said they have plans on doing more things with there Cars, Apple discontinues Apple cars.

Wouldn't you be a little worried about not only your investment but perhaps your livelihood? This isn't chicken little chief, this is real life.
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Yeah that would be a scary situation for me. I guess I'd just try to make the best of it.

Thank you, though, for explaining your point to me. No sarcasm whatsoever here, I honestly appreciate that you were willing to put it into terms that anyone (including someone like me who has minimal server experience) could understand. Much respect.
 
minjche said:
Yeah that would be a scary situation for me. I guess I'd just try to make the best of it.

Thank you, though, for explaining your point to me. No sarcasm whatsoever here, I honestly appreciate that you were willing to put it into terms that anyone (including someone like me who has minimal server experience) could understand. Much respect.
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Its scary times for a lot of us. I was very lucky to be hired by Apple and trained and certified for years before I came to my current company. Others not so much. They have invested thousand of dollars and tons of hours to get certified and now they are watching that investment go away.
 
PeterQVenkman said:
Like everyone else, they'll use Dells or HPs running Linux. Does IBM still make server stuff anymore?
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IBM do and they aren't too bad, but HP are better. I would only get IBM Intel servers as part of an end-to-end solution. Their Unix servers are in a different league though. Very good.
 
Mattie Num Nums said:
Its scary times for a lot of us. I was very lucky to be hired by Apple and trained and certified for years before I came to my current company. Others not so much. They have invested thousand of dollars and tons of hours to get certified and now they are watching that investment go away.
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I expect a few people got fired today because they recently made large Xserve purchases.

I just canceled an order for a $20k Promise RAID because I don't want to be holding the bag when Promise decides to drop support for RAIDs with the custom Apple firmware. FUD? perhaps. But Apple's surprise announcements breed FUD.

Also going to be hard explaining to my boss on Monday why we are using Apple servers and not the enterprise storage.

pmjoe said:
I'm guessing Erik realized his job wasn't worth guessing what Apple is going to do.
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And didn't have his letter blessed by the Steve first. ;)
 
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Folks, this is the most whiny thread I've read on MR in a very long time.

Apple discontinued the Xserve because it didn't give the profits they needed. If it was such a useful platform, more people would have bought it. It may have been useful to some of you, but not to the same broad audience that buys Windows, Unix or Linux servers. I've always felt that OS X Server is a niche product, and this is an example.

That said, for those of you who manage Xserves for large departments, you have a legitimate concern. The Mac Pro is a great product but it doesn't have the redundancy of a server-class product. It doesn't have redundant power supplies, and its drives cannot be accessed for hot-swaps when it is rack mounted. Worse for the Mac Mini server. Good points to these. And this raises a legitimate concern about the long-term future of the Mac platform for the enterprise - if you're relying on Open Directory and other Mac-only tools. So with that in mind, those who fall into this category should put together a brief but well-written note explaining that your entire team of (insert quantity) Mac users rely on your Xserve system for (insert technology) services. Then ask the question: what is Apple's long-term commitment to this?

Like any big business, Apple is coin-operated. Show them the money and they should come up with a solution.

Frankly, it probably doesn't matter whether the future is OS X server running under VMWare ESX, whether Apple plans to port services like Open Directory to Linux, or whether Lion will better bridge the gap with servers running Windows or Linux. What matters is that you have a platform to support your users.

As for Java - it's a real platform for business apps. It makes sense for Oracle to pick up the slack on this. If they don't, then there isn't much of a market for Java applications on Mac. It still supports web applications and C/C++ applications nicely.

Finally, for everyone else - this is a question about enterprise support. Not a question about home users or small business users. I have concerns there, but that's another topic for another day.
 
Winni said:
Yep, not even Apple has been using them -- according to James Gosling, Apple has been using a lot of Sun hardware in their data centers...
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That's scary. Sun has definitely lost its way since Oracle bought them. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole right now.
 
4D4M said:
WHAT?? Were you asleep during the MacBook Air keynote the other day?
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MacBook Airs are about as useful in a data center as an ipod touch.

shaunp said:
That's scary. Sun has definitely lost its way since Oracle bought them. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole right now.
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What are you basing this on? By all accounts, Oracle has done a great job of turning around the mess Sun had gotten itself into. For enterprise unix hardware, you can't do better than Sun or IBM.

You can do cheaper, but you can't do better.

wildmac said:
I expect a few people got fired today because they recently made large Xserve purchases.

I just canceled an order for a $20k Promise RAID because I don't want to be holding the bag when Promise decides to drop support for RAIDs with the custom Apple firmware. FUD? perhaps. But Apple's surprise announcements breed FUD.

Also going to be hard explaining to my boss on Monday why we are using Apple servers and not the enterprise storage.
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What was your rationale for buying it in the first place - and what does this change?
 
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bobr1952 said:
I didn't realize Apple made an Enterprise product like this--well better late then never to learn--but I guess in this case, it is too late. :(
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If you have enterprise purchasing authority with your company, that might explain why they didn't sell better.
 
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