Where are the rackmountable PowerMacs?

[peterjhill]

Originally posted by AlphaTech

Also, you CAN rack mount a G4 system (as well as many other older Mac's) if you invest in the hardware to do so. There are already several options available to do this, from simply new feet/handles to entire enclosures. They use about 4U on a rack.

Rackmounting means more than having a way for the thing to mount in a rack, at least for it to be useful. You need to be able to have a fully loaded rack and then to be able to access the inards of the machine in the middle without having a screwdriver.

As for thin-Mac's.... Maybe (HUGE maybe) some companies will see that as a viable solution. I severely doubt that any company with a modern infrastructor (100Mb networking to client systems)

...
The poster that you were refering to was talking about thinservers, not clients. Again, I don't necessarily think there is a big enough demand for Apple to get involved in this, but what the poster envisioned was for a way to put alot of processors into a small space. If you want to see an excellent example of this (imho) look at what dell is coming out with this is a truly amazing machine... 6 servers in 3 rack units. It will be great for a cluster of web servers using round robin dns, or Cisco's Local Director product.

As for the gf4mx card that you say is inside the G4 servers... it's not.. they are using the Radeon 7500 (check the site). You can also BTO the G4 tower (non-server) to the same card, OR you could simply yank it and sell the thing. IF you can get a cluster to work without some kind of video card, I would like to see it.

Or (gee isn't this familiar) you could connect a laptop into the serial port (which would make it a console port) and troubleshoot and fix the darn thing. There is no compelling reason that I see for investing $100 x 100 machines = $10,000 for video cards to build a Beowulf Cluster

IF you can get it to work as you want, then market the idea to Apple. Maybe you will get lucky and they will either consider it, or impliment it. Then again, they could laugh you out of the building. Unless you ask, you will never know.

Good idea, our dedicated Apple rep is actually on the floor below me right now, I will suggest the idea to him and ask him if he has any inside contacts to push the idea for rack mounted servers, done right.

 

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by AlphaTech
As for thin-Mac's.... Maybe (HUGE maybe) some companies will see that as a viable solution. I severely doubt that any company with a modern infrastructor (100Mb networking to client systems) would take away the desktop systems people have been using them and replace them with thinnet clients. It MIGHT be ok for word processing and data entry, but not any hard-core usage. Get enough people on that network and you will bog it down. It would be even worse then just accessing a server for file sharing, since your applications will also reside on the server. Sending the input through the network line is also going to tax the network. The only real way to get around that would to get everyone up to Gigabit networking. Price out converting a site from 10/100 Mb to 1000 Mb networking... It won't be cheap.

People are too used to having their own workstation on their desk with the freedom to do what they want to it. Even simple things wouldn't be easy any longer, like installing your own screen saver. Imagine how much flack you would catch if you attempted that and you brought down the server... Also, when your server goes down that everything resides on, what are you going to do?? You won't be able to do any work, since all of your files and applications are on the server. Unless you are independant of the power grid, you are vulnerable to outages.

Wow, someone doesn't read much. My original post, and all follow up have been about not clients but servers. Servers targetted at render farms, beowulf clusters, and any other application you might see blades or massive amounts of rackmountables in. I never even remotely suggested this as an alternative to workstations.

I bet there is a good reason why Apple isn't involved in the 'thin Mac' idea...

[/QOUTE]
There's a good reason that Apple isn't involved with any number of good ideas that surface here. Doesn't mean we can't post and discuss them on their merits. The reason I posted this idea is that it made sense to me and I wanted some feedback as to the feasibility of it from people in the segment it would target (if such people exist on this forum). With intelligent feedback who knows I might pass it on to apple, or do we know that apple employees don't visit this site? I mean isn't that why we put forward ideas we think are good? To have them debated and maybe a one in a million chance see them take off?

As for the gf4mx card that you say is inside the G4 servers... it's not.. they are using the Radeon 7500 (check the site). You can also BTO the G4 tower (non-server) to the same card, OR you could simply yank it and sell the thing. IF you can get a cluster to work without some kind of video card, I would like to see it.

The only reason you don't see a cluster without video cards is that many OS's expect them to be there and won't work without them. (I don't know if this is the case with linux so maybe someone knowledgible about linux can pipe in here). But if the server is designed solely for access via ethernet, and the company making it has control over the OS... you get where I'm going with this? A server without a video card would be impossible for Dell to make because they can't modify Windows and Windows expects a video card. Apple on the other hand could since they are a Vertical company. This is one of the reasons I think this could work. It requires technology and a level of total control over the product that only Apple has

You could also get KVM boxes and tie it into all the systems that you have, and use just one monitor, keyboard and mouse. THAT way, you can check on each system, for when one goes down, or needs some maintenance/work done on it.

True, you could do that but the economic advantage of this idea over other thin servers and blades is that they don't require video cards or even PCI buses. To add them back in negates the economic advantage.