Across the entire business, or particular segments? How large an install base are we talking here? I'm curious.
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Steve Jobs: Xserve Axed Over Poor Sales
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Across the entire business, or particular segments? How large an install base are we talking here? I'm curious.
There are many different kinds of "Servers" that have many different goals and needs. Generalizing about what a "Server" has to have or what the "Enterprise" has to have is always. going. to. be. wrong. Those terms are simply too broad to ever make an accurate blanket statement about. Period.
When I said "install base" I meant the physical machine installs, sorry if that was unclear. 75,000 users across the world doesn't tell me much, because depending on the service and requirements I've served a user profile like that with a Netra X1 stuck in a spare slot in a rack, or with a room full of a linux cluster with storage slices on a SAN in the next room.
They needed a space to put all the unsold XServes, so they built a big storage house to put them all in. And because Apple is green, they put the hardware to good use.
it's a lot cheaper to use RAID and redundant hardware instead of clustering everything and paying for extra servers and the insane amounts of money EMC charges for everything. even HP clusterable storage is expensive
i've swapped drives on our clusters because then we have to fail over and it's a few minutes of downtime
We have over 50,000 Physical Computers in the environment that are PC's. The rest or *nix, Apple, and Thinclients
What, you haven't seen the edgy, innovative ads Silicon Mechanics runs during prime-time television shows?
Oh, wait, neither have I.
Also rack mountable. We don't buy anything that can't readily slip into a 1U/2U/4U slot. Using desktop-form-factor boxes as servers is a pain - we used to do it in the past. It's not just a space issue; it's also a heat-management issue.
and now you are talking out of both sides of your mouth and killed your own argument.
They aren't targeting this move for the high end or middle tier clients who need load-balanced, redundant servers for high end database throughput.
Moving OS X Server onto a Mac Pro means they are targeting Engineering, Physics, Biosciences and more who connected through a Grid of distributed OpenCL ready systems can use that GPGPU power to crunch.
Unless you happen to be an in-house design team for a large corporation, where it's been mandated that all the servers are in the datacenter...
ummm those Engineering ect need a Xserver to run their macs.
Btw most of those places do not use Apple because they do not trust apple not to screw them over with the next revision or dropping a product.
This Xserve debate has release separated the Men from the Boys so to speak. Its amazing how ignorant some of these comments have been.
But those are really just workstations that run something like LSF to distribute compute load in spare cycles. Very different from "servers."
5 years from now, but yes, it's headed that way. Only Apple computers will be laptops. The design and photo industries will be headed back to Windows (especially if MS buys Adobe).
I don't think a lot of people here have any idea what a server does or what Enterprise units do with Xserves.
And you run a pretty funny shop where you can afford to leave your redundant systems down for any length of time when a simple hot-swappable mirrored drive would've provided an added level of security.
No one is advocating hot swap drives as the be all, end all. They are 1 tool in a big toolbox of redundancy and availability. Who cares that my mail services are using Active-Active type clustering over multiple nodes, it's never ideal to leave one of these nodes failed because I wanted to save 500$, nor is it ideal to have to plan downtime on a node because I was too cheap for it too.
Same for redundant power supplies, same for redundant nodes in a cluster, same for redundant fabrics in a fiber channel SAN, same for redundant mirrored storage arrays.
Each is part of a whole that makes sure your systems are available for as long as you can possibly plan for.
I never said you need xserves to support mac, but many people DO use them for that purpose.
As a system admin, I LIKE to use Mac OS X over windows/unix/linux. You'd think that would be something Apple would like to encourage. Discontinuing xserve does hurt enterprises that want to use and support mac clients on their networks.
Yeah, they could use window/unix/linux servers, but they could also use them on the client side as well.
Indeed. I know why I have Xserves, and why we have an engineering Xserve cluster.
It's like trying to get something meaningful out of MacWorld SF, where 2/3 of the vendors are selling iPod/iPhone accessories.
This response makes me think that the person emailing from Steve's address isn't actually Steve. I just can't imagine him admitting a product had failed. This is the company that never apologises and does its best to avoid admitting faults (as do all companies but I would argue Apple does this to a greater extent) so I just can't imagine him saying that.
More blanket statements. Yeesh. Depending on the type of service, "RAID and redundant hardware" has monumental costs in administration, because of the close coupling of the compute and the storage. It is very obviously not the best choice for everything, particularly if we are talking about "The Enterprise" as in high capacity/many users/other raw number metrics.
Because they were easier to configure than a Unix server to meet the needs of the graphics department. (And I've been running the servers for years, going back to when you ran Appleshare Server with OS7).
With this move, it's probably time for me to ditch the Xserves, and offload our storage requirements to the IT staff that should be doing it anyway.
The "related link" is priceless
That Youtube page had a related link to CNBC's graphics SAN using Apple XServe which quickly explains why neither Mac Pros or Mini macs are useful replacements for the XServe .
For the datacenter neophytes - watch that clip to understand how absurd Apple's "migration path" really is.
If you think that USB is a "CPU hog", don't even think about how much CPU will be consumed running iSCSI on a mini or Mac Pro !!
Serious iSCSI (by "serious" I mean just about anything but a home system) needs server-class NICs with dedicated iSCSI offload engines to avoid killing the CPU. (A typical NIC has a couple of 64-bit CPUs to handle the network and iSCSI protocol stacks).
It's also "best practice" to have a completely separate network for the iSCSI NICs (isolated from the house and world networks) with separate jumbo-frame supporting wire-speed Gigabit switches.
On a mini - haha.
That Youtube page had a related link to CNBC's graphics SAN using Apple XServe which quickly explains why neither Mac Pros or Mini macs are useful replacements for the XServe
.For the datacenter neophytes - watch that clip to understand how absurd Apple's "migration path" really is.
If you think that USB is a "CPU hog", don't even think about how much CPU will be consumed running iSCSI on a mini or Mac Pro !!
Serious iSCSI (by "serious" I mean just about anything but a home system) needs server-class NICs with dedicated iSCSI offload engines to avoid killing the CPU. (A typical NIC has a couple of 64-bit CPUs to handle the network and iSCSI protocol stacks).
It's also "best practice" to have a completely separate network for the iSCSI NICs (isolated from the house and world networks) with separate jumbo-frame supporting wire-speed Gigabit switches.
On a mini - haha.