Hey man, I know how you feel. I'm the CIO for a Fortune 100 company, and we were all set to replace over 10,000 desktop Intel/Windows systems until we found out that the Mac mini had only one FireWire port. What a bummer. You see, in our current network we use a robust, multiply redundant system of fileservers, network attached storage and storage area networks. We can centrally control access privileges across our whole organization, have a central place for file distribution rather than have stuff scattered over thousands of desktop systems, do centralized backup and file recovery, centralized storage upgrades, and keep all our IT management infrastructure in one place.
This was all going great until a few weeks ago when one of our junior office assistants sent me an e-mail saying that he would prefer it if his desktop machine had a few hundred gigabytes of local storage instead of using the high-speed, multiply redundant, centrally administered, centrally backed-up, securely managed corporate file server. "Rebooting would be faster", he explained in his e-mail. "...and I can store...umm...stuff".
Hmm...faster rebooting. Even though the Mac OS X systems we were considering generally only needed to be rebooted after applying system updates, and could be placed into sleep mode reliably day-in, day-out, he had a point. Why not reboot all the time? I had to admit it, that Apple startup chime was pretty catchy. Who was I to deny him this right? And if he was going to reboot constantly, then dammit, time is money in my organization, and I wasn't going to have him wasting valuable seconds by waiting for a 4200rpm drive to squeeze Mac OS X across a constipated parallel ATA/100 link into RAM. Then I considered his second point. Eureka! Everyone wants to store stacks of 'umm...stuff' locally. I had to admit to myself...having all our valuable corporate information stored so securely, so centrally...it was getting boring. I thought about the raw, seat-of-the-pants thrill I could obtain by shifting the entire organization's data storage architecture onto overly-large, low MBTF consumer-grade, easily portable, hard-to-backup, impossible to reliably share local storage devices, located right there on top of user's desks. Brilliant!!
I fired off a quick response to the young lad congratulating him on his fine idea and granting him a masssive pay rise (in the form of $175,852 worth of unredeemed Pepsi iTunes Music Store bottle caps). Starting on the 22nd of January, we would not only be transitioning from Intel/Windows to Mac OS X, but we would uproot our entire storage architecture! I went straight to Apple's web page to place an order for 10,000 Mac minis, and of course some iPod Socks for myself. But then my delight turned to horror. Only one FireWire 400 port? But how would each individual user hook up a second, multi-terabyte RAID box to their existing external 400GB boot drive and then shuttle files meaninglessly back and forth all day? What if they wanted to bring in their FireWire DV video cameras from home and edit movies instead of working? AND WHAT IF THEY WANTED TO REBOOT WHILE THE WHOLE THING WAS HAPPENING?!?!?!
The realization slapped me across the face like a blow from a searing hot 11-pound PowerBook G5. The Mac mini would be USELESS! I called my assistant to bring a box of bran flakes, a jug of milk, and a Zip-loc baggie. Within a few hours I had filled the baggie with exactly what I thought of Steve Jobs and his storage-crippled Mac mini, and had my assistant express freight it to Cupertino. You almost had my order Jobs...but the single FireWire 400 killed the deal. And no. We can't afford PowerMacs. Too expensive. Too noisy.
I feel your pain, little dude.
