Steve Jobs: Xserve Axed Over Poor Sales

[alexkhan2000]

I disagree with that statement because I think you're specifically speaking to major iron and not commodity servers.

Major systems, like mainframes, run for years and years and years because they're loaded with proprietary systems (like our payroll) and they cost an enormous amount to replace. Mainframes are still a huge ($$) market because they run the infrastructure of may organizations. They often run for ages but only because organizations pay through the butt for serious support contracts to keep them alive.. but that's still way less than replacement.

Our IBM support contract for the mainframe at my last place of work was $70k per year, 10 years ago. Then we finally decommissioned it and I got $1500 for the mainframe when we sold it for scrap. keeping it running was worth a lot.. even well after the hardware was obsolete.

Saying servers, in general, have a much longer upgrade cycle is very misleading though.
You're insane if you're running a mission-critical X86 server outside of warranty. The only time I'd disagree with that is in our compute clusters where we can loose a node with no real impact in the overall functionality of the system.
Heck, I only upgrade from the stock 3yr warranty on my x86 boxes when they're expensive enough that it's difficult to replace them in 3 years (that also coincides with them being powerful enough to be useful 5 years out).

One of the key selling features of servers, at least to the midrange level that cost $25,000 and up, is scalability. Even vendors selling low-end servers mention it. Blade servers are all about what you can add to your existing system as you see fit.

I'm just comparing the server market to the consumer market - especially stuff like phones, the iPod touch and the iPod - and how different these business models are and what Apple is good at.

 

[bartzilla]

This person, and many mad people, need to realize that the new Mac Pro server that is replacing the Xserve is the same price, but has a better processor (2.8 instead of 2.2) and has MUCH more storage (160gb vs 2TB). I'm going with the Mac Pro on this one.

Then you don't know what you're talking about. a Mac Pro is a toytown solution in terms of its suitability for the datacentre.

 

[Abacab]

Xserve Demise

What about collages like Virgina Tech that built one of the fasteset inexpensive supercomputers using Apple? I have 3 Xserves and this is quite disheartning.
YOU NEED REDUNDANT POWER SUPPLIES AS WELL AS HOT SWAPABLE DRIVES.! Or Do they expect a MIni Server with IP fallover?
I could live with the tower if it had those features.
AND ONE BIG IMPORTANT ISSUE, HOW DO YOU CONNECT A MINI VIA FIBER?

 

[peskaa]

What about collages like Virgina Tech that built one of the fasteset inexpensive supercomputers using Apple? I have 3 Xserves and this is quite disheartning.
YOU NEED REDUNDANT POWER SUPPLIES AS WELL AS HOT SWAPABLE DRIVES.! Or Do they expect a MIni Server with IP fallover?
I could live with the tower if it had those features.
AND ONE BIG IMPORTANT ISSUE, HOW DO YOU CONNECT A MINI VIA FIBER?

You start by taking Caps Lock off.

 

[meatballs]

Sorry for my bad language. I am french.

lmfao!

 

[minjche]

Sigh... an XServe != Mac Mini in any way, shape, or form. Businesses/Enterprises that need servers like the XServe need first and foremost hot-replaceable parts (CPUs, fans, drives, power supply). The Mac Pro and Mac Mini both do not get you anywhere close except for maybe the drive category, where you could connect a RAID enclosure (or internal raid array for Mac Pro).

The one way Apple can salvage this is to license virtualized copies of Mac OSX Server. Not likely to happen tho.

I'm not a server guy by any stretch, so apologies if this is a dumb question:

Is it possible to hot-swap a CPU? (as referenced in the above quote).

Thanks!

 

[wildmac]

I'm not a server guy by any stretch, so apologies if this is a dumb question:

Is it possible to hot-swap a CPU? (as referenced in the above quote).

Thanks!

No.

 

[KnightWRX]

Is it possible to hot-swap a CPU? (as referenced in the above quote).

Yes, and no. You can't just pull on a CPU and hope that anything survives. However, some higher-end systems (not Xserves) from Sun give you the capacity to disable system boards while keeping the system online. This of course doesn't just disable the CPUs, but also any RAM banks residing on it. Any process using those will of course crash.

Once a system board has been taken offline, it is quite possible to swap it out or some of its part while the rest of the system remains up.

I'm pretty sure HP has similar functionality with Cell boards in their superdomes, but we just use nPars here so taking a cell board offline means offlining an entire system anyway.

 

[wildmac]

When all is said and done here, what this is really about is Apple leaping away from enterprise, and shifting away from professional workstations. They are following the money.

Why? They can sell a lot more consumer electronics. Also because the desktop market has matured. CPU speed gains have tumbled (and 90% of users don't need the speed gains anymore. Unless you are a gamer, you really don't see the differences).

What's next?... Lion Server will be the last version of OSX server that's suitable for the enterprise. The following version will be a home/small-office solution that's adapted for mobile, and will have it's storage in the cloud.

OSX will cease to exist as we know it in 5 years, and will be replaced by a mature iOS. All your devices will connect to the same shared storage. Only difference will be the size of the screen you are working on and options available.

Digital graphics professionals, photographers, etc. will move on to Windows for serious workstations, because Apple won't be selling them anymore.

 

[jnpy!$4g3cwk]

Jobs reportedly responded to the email, unsurprisingly noting that poor sales were the reason for the discontinuation.While Apple has not routinely revealed sales figures for the Xserve, the report points to data from research firm Gartner published several years ago showing that Apple was selling on the order of 10,000 units per quarter, a tiny fraction of the company's overall computer sales.

Apple never would have gotten where it did with shallow thinking like that. As long as Apple wasn't losing big money on it, it is still a ~$300M/year business -- worthwhile even for a big company. (How big a market was the old Apple TV?) But the real reason for Xserve/RAID/OS X Server/etc is not to sell Xserves, but, to sell MBP's to Enterprise customers. The Mac Pro serves the same function for the "creative" marketplace-- a lot of MBP's get sold because of the availability of the Mac Pro, even though it is not that big a market.

So, this raises the question again of where Apple is going with OS X and MBP. I think a lot of this has to do with the whole "marketing through secrecy" thing. Apple doesn't seem to be able to reconcile the secrecy it uses so effectively with the iToys consumer market, and the predictability and transparency required by the Enterprise and Creative markets.

 

[jnpy!$4g3cwk]

I'm not a server guy by any stretch, so apologies if this is a dumb question:

Is it possible to hot-swap a CPU? (as referenced in the above quote).

Thanks!

Yes, in fact it has been possible since the late 1960's on certain mainframes, and, has been done more recently from time to time for the large database server market. It takes a lot of H/W and S/W engineering to keep it working, though, and, things are generally not done that way anymore. Think Google -- most "cloud" services today are built so that most individual systems can go away and the services keep running. It doesn't work for everything, but, for things that can be built that way, it is dirt cheap.

 

[daveschroeder]

An Open Letter to Apple on Server Technologies

The Xserve announcement leaves us in a position of having no credible way to run Mac OS X Server in our enterprise datacenters. We hope that this "open letter" to Apple can help bring attention to this issue that many of us in academic and government sectors share:

http://AppleOpenLetter.com

Regards,

Dave Schroeder
Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE)
Apple University Executive Forum (UEF)
MacEnterprise
University of Wisconsin-Madison
das@doit.wisc.edu
http://das.doit.wisc.edu
+1 608 265-4737 (office)
+1 608 444-5672 (mobile)

 

[AidenShaw]

The Xserve announcement leaves us in a position of having no credible way to run Mac OS X Server in our enterprise datacenters. We hope that this "open letter" to Apple can help bring attention to this issue that many of us in academic and government sectors share:

http://AppleOpenLetter.com

Very nice clear and balanced statement, good luck.

At this point though, the cliché about having "burned their bridges" seems appropriate for the situation.

Had Apple announced virtualization support along with the XServe cancellation announcement, it would have been seen as a strategic change in direction - and heartily embraced.

At this point, though, any announcement about Apple OSX server hardware will be seen as "damage control", not as "strategy".

Would any enterprise professional honestly believe that a change by Apple at this point would be anything more than a bridge to give one another year to get rid of Apple in the datacenter?

Burned bridges - Apple has made your accreditations mostly irrelevant. Apple is career poison in the enterprise.

 

[alent1234]

Yes, in fact it has been possible since the late 1960's on certain mainframes, and, has been done more recently from time to time for the large database server market. It takes a lot of H/W and S/W engineering to keep it working, though, and, things are generally not done that way anymore. Think Google -- most "cloud" services today are built so that most individual systems can go away and the services keep running. It doesn't work for everything, but, for things that can be built that way, it is dirt cheap.

IBM and HP have it on their more expensive models. I think itanium servers have this feature, but most people don't care about it. just like hot swap RAM

 

[alent1234]

Apple never would have gotten where it did with shallow thinking like that. As long as Apple wasn't losing big money on it, it is still a ~$300M/year business -- worthwhile even for a big company. (How big a market was the old Apple TV?) But the real reason for Xserve/RAID/OS X Server/etc is not to sell Xserves, but, to sell MBP's to Enterprise customers. The Mac Pro serves the same function for the "creative" marketplace-- a lot of MBP's get sold because of the availability of the Mac Pro, even though it is not that big a market.

So, this raises the question again of where Apple is going with OS X and MBP. I think a lot of this has to do with the whole "marketing through secrecy" thing. Apple doesn't seem to be able to reconcile the secrecy it uses so effectively with the iToys consumer market, and the predictability and transparency required by the Enterprise and Creative markets.

it will be funny if apple shows off a nice OS X 10.7 server that you can run on HP hardware and virtualize and expect people to just dump whatever they bought in the last year after the xserve fiasco and go back to apple

 

[cube]

Yes, and no. You can't just pull on a CPU and hope that anything survives. However, some higher-end systems (not Xserves) from Sun give you the capacity to disable system boards while keeping the system online. This of course doesn't just disable the CPUs, but also any RAM banks residing on it. Any process using those will of course crash.

If you use zones you can migrate them to another system.

 

[kntgsp]

This person, and many mad people, need to realize that the new Mac Pro server that is replacing the Xserve is the same price, but has a better processor (2.8 instead of 2.2) and has MUCH more storage (160gb vs 2TB). I'm going with the Mac Pro on this one.

Please post a video of you mounting a Mac Pro in a 1U rack.

It will be very entertaining for us, I'm sure.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Yes, two Mini macs per 6 square foot of datacenter floor space would make any datacenter manager happy.

Not.

Did you forget part of your post (if nothing else, the "sarcasm" tag)?

Two in a 6 foot space? WTF are you talking about???

The Xserve is 1.73x17.6x30 and fits in a standard 19-inch rack. A Mac-Mini is 1.4x7.7x7.7. That means Apple could make a rack adapter with cabling extenders that could fit two Mac Mini units per rack space (not per entire rack!!!). I won't comment on the reliability of doing so, etc., but then I'm not the one selling a "Mac Mini Server". Apple is. And they obviously think that was a "good move". You, however, seem to think I meant putting two Mac Minis in the space of an entire rack, not a single rack space. I don't know whether to be insulted or just laugh.

Mac mini is freaking frisbee not a server. Its a toy! You honestly think we would rely on using Mac mini "server" when dealing with projects worth >$100 000?

Ah, finally someone who has the courage on here to tell the fanboys the truth about Apple products.

Seriously, what's your alternative, but a toy at this point? The Xserve is GONE. History. Done. Finished. In my opinion, a professional wouldn't use an Apple server period. Why would anyone want to use Apple? It's extremely expensive (Linux is dirt cheap by comparison) and largely unsupported (most of all by Apple). Apple doesn't even care about the Enterprise environment. If they did, they would put more effort into making in-roads into that environment and making more competitive products. Apple puts the same cost-gouging into their "pro" models as they do their "consumer" ones (seeing as they don't see any difference between the two).

Frankly, I can't wait to hear you call some more Apple products "toys" and "frisbees" and watch the crazed fanboys on here try to tear you a new one. I never liked the Mini, but calling it a Frisbee is just as stupid as Apple trying to push the Mini and Mac Pro as "servers" in the first place. I consider *MOST* Macs "toys" in the sense that both Mini and iMac alike are mostly mobile products made for home environments.

 

[drsmithy]

Your "if" in that last sentence is the key thing. Of course your SAN has hot-swappable storage--that's the whole point. Many (most) blades do not, and most blades do not have redundant power themselves. In part because of that "if".

Most blades on the market *do* have hotswap drives, and all the majors (IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco) have redundant power supplies in the chassis and redundant (ie: dual) circuits to each individual blade. Broadly speaking, a blade chassis is architected just like a minituarised rack (with the exception of Cisco's UCS) and redundancy is implemented in an identical fashion.


The level of ignorance displayed in this discussion about redundancy is staggering. Not only about what sort of redudancy needs to exist, but *why* it needs to exist. Eg: no-one has yet pointed out that it's not just to address machine component failures, but also environmental failures. Few seem to grasp that having a spare machine lying around is in no way the same thing as having a machine that can withstand hardware and environmental failures, especially when the machines are so spectacularly inappropriate for centralised storage as a Mac Mini, and OSX has no real clustering or data synchronisation capabilities.

Finally, few also seem to understand the problem is not that Apple have discontinued the Xserve. The problem is they have done so without offering up a viable alternative, despite quite good ones being both obvious and simple. This smacks of either a) poor planning or b) a total disregard for - bordering on outright hostility towards - their customers.

 

[AidenShaw]

Two in a 6 foot space? WTF are you talking about???

You said:

Apple could make a rack adapter for the mini (maybe even fit two per rack).

Yes - 2 per rack. A rack is about 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep - which makes it two Mini macs in 6 square feet.

On the other hand, you could fit 8 Mini macs on a 1U shelf, which would be 336 Mini macs per standard 42U rack. (This would require up to 29kW of power though, so they'd probably melt unless you had a rack with forced air circulation.)

Which is why I asked if you made a mistake or left something out of your post....

 

[minjche]

Yes - 2 per rack. A rack is about 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep - which makes it two Mini macs in 6 square feet.

I took what MagnusVonMagnum to mean two Mac Minis per 1U (and scale that to however many shelves are on a rack). Perhaps that's not the standard terminology used in the industry but at least from this end it made sense and seemed silly to think he was saying two-per-entire-rack-enclosure.

Just my two cents.

 

[baddj]

Maybe there sales are low on them because they cost more then a dell or hp server with Linux on it.

 

[lucaspkm]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Is anyone really surprised?

Clearly Mac isn't doing very well in the business world, in terms of workers (windows and office dominate) and in terms of servers (windows and Linux dominate).

Moreover, clearly Apple are focusing on the personal market, and to a certain extent very small businesses.

well architect firms and design firms uses them in large amount i don't see why they stop macs from business world moreover mac are having big favors in business world now a days more and more company are getting them.

 

[lucaspkm]

Like I said: for price of one low-end Xserve, you could have three Mac mini servers. You have your redundancy right there. One machine goes down, you still have two left.

mac mini servers can't do nuts, image mac mini servers serving 200 clients......._|_

 

[lucaspkm]

What would you buy if you were going to buy a server? A xserver or a dl360? OS X server gui is nice but unnecessary for any competent sys admin so the only real market is small mac based companies and most of them have the space for a mac pro.

i would still get xserve i do not need the GUI interface but however if your client base is mac why you wanna buy a pc base server?