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.
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Steve Jobs: Xserve Axed Over Poor Sales
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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.
How exactly do you "lose redundancy"? You can have three redundant machines mirroring each other. And those three machines would still take less space that one Xserve does.
Instead of having redundancy at the component-level, you could have redundancy at the server-level.
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It's a possibility that they'll still make Xserves, but only for internal use. It would mean that the Xserve may come back someday, which I suspect.
zaphon said:
It's a possibility that they'll still make Xserves, but only for internal use. It would mean that the Xserve may come back someday, which I suspect.
And takes up a lot more space in areas (server rooms) where space is often limited, hence the usage of racks.
And you put those Mac Minis where in your server room...? Ah. I thought so. You have never seen a server room.
But you've got a point there, at least in principal: For the price of an Xserve, you could easily get three other low-end rack-mountable servers with better enterprise support than what Apple ever offered.
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This was obvious from the announcement. In fact, it should have been obvious to everyone *before* the announcement. Duh.
This was obvious from the announcement. In fact, it should have been obvious to everyone *before* the announcement. Duh.
XServe is a great server, but I can see why AAPL is ditching it. No matter how great a small audience might think they are, if they're not selling AAPL can't justify making them - nor should they.
AAPL needs to stay nimble and make sure that they're on top of any dogs in their product lineup. Remember the 90's? The product lineup was large and complicated and full of all sorts of things that weren't selling.
It may mean we wind up with a 'serverless' version of MacOS in the future, but what would that really mean for AAPL as a whole?
I'd much rather see them focus on innovating products that keep them competitive in each respective product category.
You kind of have to respect their discipline in this.
AAPL needs to stay nimble and make sure that they're on top of any dogs in their product lineup. Remember the 90's? The product lineup was large and complicated and full of all sorts of things that weren't selling.
It may mean we wind up with a 'serverless' version of MacOS in the future, but what would that really mean for AAPL as a whole?
I'd much rather see them focus on innovating products that keep them competitive in each respective product category.
You kind of have to respect their discipline in this.
If it's a question on how to do business, I side with Steve Jobs, not (no offense) random guy on the Internet.
I understand that they were selling poorly. I understand from a business standpoint why they did it. What I can't understand though is that Apple has made it very clear that they are trying to get back into (were they ever?) businesses and not just home sales. Not very good timing if you ask me to kill off Xserve.
Since they were not selling many, then they should have no issue certifying and licensing Mac OS X Server to run in VM enterprise environments (like VMWare vSphere) since it wouldn't be cannibalizing hardware sales of their own. That actually could turn out to be a much more lucrative market then XServers.
Anyone who thinks the new Mac Pro "Server" edition or using multiple mac mini's are a valid replacement in a enterprise environment clearly has never worked in, supported, or managed an enterprise environment.
Anyone who thinks the new Mac Pro "Server" edition or using multiple mac mini's are a valid replacement in a enterprise environment clearly has never worked in, supported, or managed an enterprise environment.
And in a best case configuration, you will have 3 x 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo versus 1 or 2 x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors (up to 2 x 2.93GHz).
Might as well be telling an Escalade SUV buyer to buy 3 Smart Car's because they cost the same and take up approximately the same space?
Actually, I work in one each and every day. Ever heard of trays? Somehow guys at Mac mini Colo manage to have over 600 Mac mini's in their facility.
You clearly have never run servers.
1) An Xserve, even the out of date ones we have currently, are way faster than a Mac Mini. Apple's own figures say that a Mini Server will handle approx. 50 clients, whereas an Xserve will handle 500. That's 10x the performance - so even if you buy 4 Mac Minis, that's only 200 clients to 500.
2) Xserves have Lights Off Management. Minis don't. Xserves have proper hard drives in, not 5,400rpm laptop drives. Xserves have an SSD for boot drive option. Xserves have slots for Fibre Channel cards. Minis don't. There's a mass of hardware differences - oh, and the Xserves can take way more RAM.
3) Redundancy when you're dealing with a bunch of servers is far easier when you can just pull a duff drive module without taking the server out the rack, or pull the PSU whilst the server keeps going on its secondary PSU. Mirroring entire machines is a waste, as you have to have duplicates of every machine, which is a waste of cash.
We have 20 Xserves. 18 are live, running full time. We have 2 spares that can jump in if one develops a serious fault requiring it to be pulled, and we keep spares for most parts in house. Minis just wouldn't handle the job.
As has already been posted repeatedly, they use Sun (now Oracle) servers and Solaris. Or, in other words, Apple has never eaten its own dog food. Now THAT should make one think -- obviously, Apple never believed that their own hardware and server operating system was up to the job, or else they would have used it.
When Microsoft bought Hotmail, they at least tried to migrate everything to Windows Servers. It appears that they show a different attitude towards their own products in Redmond.
I think Jobs is great, but from managing 2 Xserve's & 180 Mac's with a joint AD/OD system I can say ditching the Xserve is PANTS.
Bad idea - especially considering business's are looking to head the Mac Route - is Job's answer is to slam a Mac Mini in a server rack room, or a MacPro dwindling on the floor!?
Crazy.
Bad idea - especially considering business's are looking to head the Mac Route - is Job's answer is to slam a Mac Mini in a server rack room, or a MacPro dwindling on the floor!?
Crazy.
Correct. Apple is trying to make in-roads into the enterprise space with iPhone and iPad, but they just screwed the folks who bought their rack-mount servers. This is not how you do things in the enterprise world. IBM has proved that you earn respect by offering long-term support and migration paths. They should have partnered with somebody to provide Mac OSX Server on a rack-mount machine if they did not want to bother producing it. Then Apple would be in the software business in the enterprise server arena and be leaving the hardware to someone else. Sure Xserve was a niche, but for those businesses that went "all mac", it was an essential part of the solution.
Correct again -- I can't imagine an IT department with a bunch of Mac Pros stacked on shelves. It is just not space efficient to do so. And the MacMini is way underpowered. They need a better upgrade path for those customers who bought into the all-mac solution.
To Apple: You know WHY they weren't selling that great? Because everyone was waiting for an update! 580 days since the last update means to people that an update SHOULD be coming, so WHY would you buy and risk your money? DUH Steve!
That's actually a pretty good idea, if they were worried about losing money because people aren't buying the hardware off them anymore, they could always charge more for a VMware version.
Mac Pros have pretty easy drive access as compared to other workstations but you're right about that. 12u? We're not talking about a minifridge,I can see this thing being 4-6u tops.
The Xserve is no longer being produced but I'm not so sure we've heard all of what is happening with it, virtualization may well be a possibility still.
Yep. But that's not an argument for anyone here, because the average Mac users don't live and work in real IT environments and never see a server room or a data center from the inside. So they believe that a tower computer actually can be a valid substitute for a rack mountable machine - and at the same time wonder why the IT crowd at their company is so "hostile" towards their consumer/home computers...
Not just redundancy in computers but hard drives. What about high speed connections to external, large RAID 50 or 60 arrays?