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Apple should kill Xserve (Page 2)
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tooki
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:13 AM
 
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
Apple should exit the server hardware business and embrace virtualization. I do not think they can continue to design their own hardware and compete in the enterprise space. I believe they will have more growth potential by allowing OS X Server to run on any virtualization platform. Am I right about this?
But Apple is a hardware company. Apple software is critical -- it's the carrot. But money is made selling hardware. Xserves are priced well, and they're the ONLY Mac hardware with redundancy, lights-out management, etc, or that is rack mounted. Mac Pros are incredibly inefficient to rack mount.

How would Apple profit by giving that up and selling OS X Server at $1K/license?
     
kikkoman  (op)
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Feb 28, 2009, 07:37 AM
 
Originally Posted by goMac View Post
What's wrong with XServe? The hardware is great, it works out of the box, and the support is decent.
I have no complaint against the XServe. Indeed, the hardware is nice but Apple's hardware selection is limited. How cool would it be to run OS X Server on blades? Virtualization can let you run OS X server on hardware that you're most likely not going to see coming from Apple.
( Last edited by kikkoman; Feb 28, 2009 at 09:04 AM. )
     
kikkoman  (op)
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Feb 28, 2009, 08:01 AM
 
Originally Posted by OreoCookie View Post
really fail to see your point: if Apple makes a profit making their XServes, and I assume here they do, why should they stop making them?
In this day and age it's not enough to be profitable. You need to demonstrate growth to your share holders and constituents. Apple always touts double digit gains for their consumer products but not so much for their so called "enterprise" solutions. Yes, there are more sales to made on the consumer side. What troubles me is that I don't see a commitment by Apple to expand in the enterprise space. Virtualization is where the enterprise back end is headed. It's in Apple's best interest to get in early rather than late. If they can be successful running in a virtualized platform, why should they continue making hardware?
( Last edited by kikkoman; Feb 28, 2009 at 08:13 AM. )
     
OreoCookie
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Feb 28, 2009, 08:31 AM
 
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
In this day and age it's not enough to be profitable. You need to demonstrate growth to your share holders and constituents.
I think Apple operates a little bit differently here, Apple has more of a long-term point of view than most other companies. To be profitable in a niche market is a good thing and it takes the need to kill a product in my opinion. Plus, some of Apple's products depend on a small Apple server -- or rather: a server that runs OS X natively.
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
Apple always touts double digit gains for their consumer products but not so much for their so called "enterprise" solutions. Yes, there are more sales to made on the consumer side.
That's because Apple is in a rather special niche of the `enterprise solutions market,' they're making small servers for work groups and special apps such as Final Cut Server. Compared to the consumer market, there is not much growth here. But it helps to sell Final Cut Pro licenses, Mac Pros and whatnot, because you can get what you need from one company.
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
What troubles me is that I don't see a commitment by Apple to expand in the enterprise space. Virtualization is where the enterprise back end is headed. It's in Apple's best interest to get in early rather than late. If they can be successful running in a virtualization platform why should they continue making hardware?
I hope Apple does not expand a lot here, because as a German proverb goes `Schuster, bleib' bei Deinen Leisten.' Meaning, you should focus on your core competences. Apple does not (and currently cannot) compete with big iron manufacturers on the server side. For professional big iron workstations/servers, the price of hardware is just a tiny bit in the equation. It's about excellent service. A few years back, one of the big AlphaStations had problems, some complicated RAM + Cache thing. 6 hours later, this puppy had new RAM and a new pair of cpus. If the extended warranty hadn't covered it, the replacement hardware would have cost close to 6 or 8 grand.

To achieve this level of support, Apple would have to invest a lot of money into a rather small market with lots of players. I'd much rather see them partnering up with, say, IBM or Sun to make special servers that run OS X Server, but where IBM gives hardware support. That would not really play well with Apple's concept of having one vendor for both, hardware and software.

On the other hand, since OS X is Unix-based, you could just get a big iron server anyway, put the favorite flavor of *nix on it and integrate it with OS X clients. If you pay more than 20k, 50k or more for the server hardware alone, chances are that there is somebody who knows how to administer them.

I don't think virtualization is going to have much of an impact for Apple's primary target group, even if they could benefit from this technology. Most small companies have one guy `also' knows computers, because he reads computer mags on the way to work and knows what a Windows registry is. For this group, the primary cost is hardware, they see little else. Perhaps, they also see the cost of new software licenses as well, but that's where it stops. To most of them, virtualization, as easy as it may be, is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma.
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Feb 28, 2009, 08:55 AM
 
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
In this day and age it's not enough to be profitable.


Not been reading any newspapers lately? In this day and age it's enough to be breaking even and still in business.
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chris v
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Feb 28, 2009, 09:50 AM
 
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
In this day and age it's not enough to be profitable. You need to demonstrate growth to your share holders and constituents.

If you make it ALL about growth, growth, growth, it turns into a Ponzi scheme, especially when you're selling something that has a specialized & finite market. Look at the growth problems Dell has had in the last 4 years. Their whole attitude was "Sure, we're making 5 cents per computer, but next year, we'll sell twice as many and still make 4 cents per computer. You just can't keep that up forever, as eventually, you saturate. The iPod has about reached saturation, and the iPhone will soon, too. You've got to be able to know you're profitable with 0% growth before you grow.

Investors demanding rapid growth are part of the culture of instant gratification that's driven Wall Street into the ditch. I think Apple's slow but steady approach has served them well over time & will continue to do so.

Also, Apple selling a standalone OSX box that'll be installable on anyone's hardware is an utterly moot point as long as Jobs is in charge. It' just not gonna happen any time soon.

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Feb 28, 2009, 10:55 AM
 
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
In this day and age it's not enough to be profitable.
Yes, true, you also need free cash flow.

But there's no indication that Apple wouldn't have that with XServe.

-t
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 02:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by OreoCookie View Post
That's because Apple is in a rather special niche of the `enterprise solutions market,' they're making small servers for work groups and special apps such as Final Cut Server. Compared to the consumer market, there is not much growth here. But it helps to sell Final Cut Pro licenses, Mac Pros and whatnot, because you can get what you need from one company.

I hope Apple does not expand a lot here, because as a German proverb goes `Schuster, bleib' bei Deinen Leisten.' Meaning, you should focus on your core competences. Apple does not (and currently cannot) compete with big iron manufacturers on the server side.
This is a good point - Apple has never been geared toward high volume sales. If that were the case, they would have opened up OS X to other hardware a long time ago. Instead, they're focused on a niche market and customer loyalty. I don't see a need for OS X server, but that's because I think about things from an enterprise perspective. Apple never intended to be enterprise-minded; there's no good reason for them to start now.

I don't doubt that Apple will open themselves up to virtualization solutions within their own hardware/software universe. I do, however, highly doubt that they'll ever open up OS X Server for virtualization on third-party hardware and OSes.
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kikkoman  (op)
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Feb 28, 2009, 03:27 PM
 
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
I don't doubt that Apple will open themselves up to virtualization solutions within their own hardware/software universe. I do, however, highly doubt that they'll ever open up OS X Server for virtualization on third-party hardware and OSes.
I agree that's more likely to happen. I can't imagine Apple's internal enterprise IT group wouldn't advocate the move to virtualization.
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 03:52 PM
 
I think some of you guys are missing an important piece of the puzzle here.

Clustering. Look at what Google has done - taken a whole bunch of commodity PCs and built an infrastructure based off of hardware that individually is not terribly impressive. As long as your power and racking costs are lower than the costs of putting down tens of thousands of dollars for enterprise hardware and support contracts, maybe the future is actually in gobs and gobs of servers with hardware similar to what is offered in an XServe, running in VM clusters?

In terms of power consumption, as energy prices increase I'm wondering if it would make more sense to design machine rooms to become tons of small, compartmentalized rooms where energy is not wasted trying to cool large rooms? As long as you have the real estate (and since your property could be literally anywhere you can get the fiber that you need), perhaps the cost of expanding machine rooms horizontally (i.e. building more rooms) would be cheaper with energy costs on the trajectory they are on now?

In my mind, the way that we think of designing this sort of high powered infrastructure is changing. I'm not sure if anything I'm saying is true, but I do know that there is a lot of interest in finding cheaper ways to build these infrastructures, and this often involves some of the variables I bring up here...
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 04:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by kikkoman View Post
I have no complaint against the XServe. Indeed, the hardware is nice but Apple's hardware selection is limited. How cool would it be to run OS X Server on blades? Virtualization can let you run OS X server on hardware that you're most likely not going to see coming from Apple.
So why are you saying they should kill it?
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nonhuman
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Feb 28, 2009, 05:34 PM
 
I think it's much more likely that Apple will build virtualization into OS X (Server?) and start offering Xserves (and Mac Pros?) with greater and greater numbers of cores.

There's no reason that they can't embrace virtualization while still selling Xserves.
     
besson3c
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Feb 28, 2009, 05:55 PM
 
nonhuman: how would that help them? XServes are only going to be attractive to people looking to run OS X Server, or, given your scenario, people interested in virtualization that are content with Apple's hardware options, support, warranty, etc. What really makes virtualization work is not a single box to run a VM host on (and, worthy of note, OS X Server does not support an actual VM Server product), but VM clusters. When you step into VM clusters you are getting into fiber channel support for SANs, and whole other level of service that Apple has not demonstrated that they are interested in, thus far.

As far as the software goes, VMWare ESX is a vastly different product than Fusion or Parallels, but the capabilities that ESX offers would be a requirement to make an XServe a viable VM host or member of a cluster. If you really want to run a VM server on a single box, you can just install Linux on the XServe and install the free VMWare Server today (this is actually really easy). While offering something comparable for OS X Server would definitely be a step in the right direction, it alone is not enough to allow Apple to enter the Enterprise scene.

What Apple would be best off doing if they are interested in the Enterprise is making sure that the XServe is an attractive option for a VMWare/ovirt cluster, and allowing OS X client and server itself to be virtualized in these sorts of environments so that Apple software is relevant in these environments. Additionally, they need to revamp their whole server strategy and staffing, and start offering real solutions rather than fluffy marketing.

We've had this conversation before, and it has been pointed out to me that Apple is not going after Enterprise. I have grown to accept that, this is true. However, I'm just not all that certain that limiting their strategy only to small business is going to be a viable long term strategy as capabilities that allow centralizing and outsourcing of IT services continue to grow. Maybe my logic is flawed, but like I said, things definitely seem to be changing.
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:00 PM
 
Let me provide a real world example as to how things are changing... You can now get a complete dedicated VPS for $20/month now at Slicehost or Linode. The only problem is the price of disk, but as this becomes less and less of a problem (and solutions similar to Amazon S3 continue to grow), how is Apple going to compete with these sorts of companies in the small business space?
     
nonhuman
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:01 PM
 
All I'm saying is that if Apple is going to embrace virtualization they're going to do it the Apple way: by making it brain-dead easy for the user. They'll make it insanely simple to cluster a bunch of Xserves and run as many instances of virtualized OS X Server as you want.
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:15 PM
 
Let's analyze this...

If you are a small business and you need a server, an XServe is going to start at $3000 (I'm assuming this excludes support contracts). Say you plan on keeping this for 3 years, this ends up being $83/month. Add on the costs of replacing failed hardware, electricity for this machine, your internet connection, bandwidth, facilities, cooling, the time that is involved, and lack of remote console access...

Compare this to the $80/month VPS that Linode offers... You get less disk space, less RAM, but your electricity costs are covered, you get 800 gb of bandwidth each month, the hardware is the responsibility of somebody else, as are the facilities, cooling, etc. Your VPS may get free upgrades as the underlying cluster is expanded, and most likely I/O and likely CPU power is going to be greater. Even though your disk space is less (Linode offers 48gb at that price) it is sitting on a RAID 10 SAN. Most of all, you have complete remote access, the ability to setup multiple work sites that can easily access the server over a more reliable and probably faster network than something like business DSL, and built in support.

The XServe may offer ease of use in some areas, but at some point the benefits of a VPS are simply going to be too great.

I'm not sure I buy the idea of an XServe "not requiring an IT person", because to me it seems likely a shaky strategy trusting *any* kind of $3000+ server and the security of the company to a non-tech savvy person. One way or another, most small businesses are going to involve some sort of IT person.
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:18 PM
 
You're assuming that all servers are public-facing Bess.
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besson3c
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:24 PM
 
Originally Posted by nonhuman View Post
All I'm saying is that if Apple is going to embrace virtualization they're going to do it the Apple way: by making it brain-dead easy for the user. They'll make it insanely simple to cluster a bunch of Xserves and run as many instances of virtualized OS X Server as you want.
Yeah, but you're oversimplifying what would be involved to do this effectively.

ESX Server will do stuff like share memory, dynamically move busy VMs to idle CPUs, and do all sorts of stuff behind the scenes to load balance and share resources intelligently. You can get ESX to isolate certain pools of hardware for certain VMs, automatically allocate or deallocate resources at certain times of the day, and build complicated networking structures that involve numerous private and public VLANs, load balancing hardware, pool management, etc.

Yes Apple *could* provide this sort of software, but this is complex enough that I doubt that it will be brain-dead easy the way that using iLife is brain dead easy. It will be *relatively* brain-dead easy, but Apple has a *lot* of catching up to do. When you are investing potentially tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars into a VM cluster, "easy enough" and the cheapest, most efficient, effective, intelligent, capable VM cluster will probably win out.
     
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Feb 28, 2009, 06:26 PM
 
Originally Posted by Doofy View Post
You're assuming that all servers are public-facing Bess.
Excellent point. However, there is always VPN. I would be willing to bet that most small businesses do not have their servers racked onsite anyway. It would probably make their property, insurance, and all other costs way too expensive, in most cases.
     
goMac
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Feb 28, 2009, 07:12 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Let me provide a real world example as to how things are changing... You can now get a complete dedicated VPS for $20/month now at Slicehost or Linode. The only problem is the price of disk, but as this becomes less and less of a problem (and solutions similar to Amazon S3 continue to grow), how is Apple going to compete with these sorts of companies in the small business space?
They're not. They sell dedicated servers. Not shared hosting.
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OreoCookie
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Feb 28, 2009, 09:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Excellent point. However, there is always VPN. I would be willing to bet that most small businesses do not have their servers racked onsite anyway. It would probably make their property, insurance, and all other costs way too expensive, in most cases.
Even then, some smaller businesses can be very sceptical of putting anything with so much of their confidential and business critical applications outside of their home. Even if it is to their own disadvantage. I remember the case of a business partner of my dad. It's a relatively small, innovative company that made a computer + paper-based documentation system for special construction projects. Naturally, several companies have to work together and scan their paperwork to their server. Obviously, it's technically a lot easier if you'd have one central server for all, but they insisted to use their own. This made the whole software solution a lot more complex, but it was the only way they'd agree to do it. Data was only transmitted as per request of the other servers.

Please don't explain to me why this is technically inferior, you don't need to convince me
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Clustering. Look at what Google has done - taken a whole bunch of commodity PCs and built an infrastructure based off of hardware that individually is not terribly impressive.
Most people don't have google-type workloads or google-type engineers or google-type requirements. Again, most businesses are small and they want a box called ``server'' to put their data on and whatnot. Virtualization and all that is too difficult for them to grasp. Perhaps it will change once `the cloud' gets more powerful, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
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My experinece with virtualization is very very large boxes running lots of VMs (IBM Mainframes with z/VM and Linux on top). It seems that the mid range servers from IBM are also popular VM hosts.
     
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My only problem with virtualization is that it's putting all your eggs in one basket. If one server goes down, all your servers go down. You better have secondary and even tertiary backup servers.
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Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
My only problem with virtualization is that it's putting all your eggs in one basket. If one server goes down, all your servers go down. You better have secondary and even tertiary backup servers.
This only applies to having a single VM host. This is not the case with a VM cluster.
     
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Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
Linux and OS X are about equally functional for me as an OS.
Good thing you put in the for me qualifier, because you are in a microscopical minority for which that statement even has a grain of truth beyond self-delusion.

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Mar 4, 2009, 11:47 AM
 
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
...except that most enterprise environments don't use Windows or OS X for servers.
Most enterprises use scads of Windows servers. True, many have migrated to Linux for some or even the majority of functionality, but Windows AND unix (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc) have a very strong foothold in the enterprise. MS Exchange is almost everywhere in the Fortune 500. SQL server is huge. Sharepoint is huge. IIS is still huge.

Hell, in the financial world Mainframes still play a major role.

Linux is big, but it is nowhere near ubiquitous.
     
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Mar 4, 2009, 02:18 PM
 
The last organization I worked at had 2-3 Linux servers. We had about 15 Windows servers, and towards the end of working there, our Mac servers had ramped up to about 15 also...

There just wasn't much of a need for Linux, especially when you aren't supporting Linux for the user anyway.
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What did your servers in this organization do, goMac?
     
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goMac
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Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
What did your servers in this organization do, goMac?
Active directory, LDAP, Filemaker Pro, MySQL, MSSQL, PHP, ASP, QTSS, other custom 3rd party software..

To be fair, it wasn't like our Linux servers sat around doing nothing. They did the packet shaping on the network.

For the record, I know Samba can do stuff like Active Directory, but I wasn't in charge of the servers, so don't ask me questions about why we didn't use Linux for : blank : .
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goMac: what scale?

See, to me, that's where things start to change. For small scale stuff that tradeoff of ease-of-use over complexity and more flexibility often favors the ease-of-use side. At the larger scale, when performance, security, and the ability to make very small granular changes trumps everything, this usually seems to move away from turnkey style solutions. This is where Linux generally works best over the turnkey sort of solutions offered by both MS and Apple.
     
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Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
goMac: what scale?

See, to me, that's where things start to change. For small scale stuff that tradeoff of ease-of-use over complexity and more flexibility often favors the ease-of-use side. At the larger scale, when performance, security, and the ability to make very small granular changes trumps everything, this usually seems to move away from turnkey style solutions. This is where Linux generally works best over the turnkey sort of solutions offered by both MS and Apple.
About 15k-20k users for the server bank that I'm talking about.

I have no idea on our web/QTSS servers, although we were also running a TV station (as a side thing, NOT the main job).
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Originally Posted by Paco500 View Post
Most enterprises use scads of Windows servers. True, many have migrated to Linux for some or even the majority of functionality, but Windows AND unix (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc) have a very strong foothold in the enterprise. MS Exchange is almost everywhere in the Fortune 500. SQL server is huge. Sharepoint is huge. IIS is still huge.

Hell, in the financial world Mainframes still play a major role.

Linux is big, but it is nowhere near ubiquitous.
The last company that I worked for had 90,000 people worldwide. We used, and they still do, every single OS that I had ever heard of. The Windows server room in France was gigantic (they had data centres all over the world), at one stage they were adding 2000 Windows servers worldwide per month. There was every UNIX type imaginable, and versions of each type going back years (yes shock horror unsupported operating systems running business critical applications). At one time they were beta testers for new IBM hardware - in particular the mainframes. Mainframes still play a very very major role in the world of business. Companies like Wal-Mart, Ford, AXA, UPS etc etc still use (and in fact use more) mainframes. If you use a cash machine, there is a 90% chance that your withdrawal had a mainframe at the end of the line. As a server OS, in my humble experience, nothing beats z/OS for stability, security, reliability, speed and robustness. Its a pity that in lots of companies nobody wants to use it. Green screens scare people I guess.

Just for some info, the mainframe team had two very large machines in a cluster (sysplex) for the internal customers. They decided to run some Linux VMs on this two node cluster. They had over 600 linux instances running when I left. The UNIX team hated this because they couldn't compete with the price of the Linux VM offered by the mainframe team.
     
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Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
This is accurate as well. I always laugh a little when people insist that Apple's hardware is superior to other providers. I started laughing even more in the aftermath of my epic clamshell mod project, in which it was made pretty clear that the internals of Apple's offerings are no different than any other manufacturer. You can bet the house that HP and Dell's rack-mount servers use the same components as Apple's hardware.
I was speaking to one of the xserve engineers at WWDC a few years back, when the intel xserve had just been launched. He was enthusing about how they put thought into every little aspect of the design process: for example, the airflow is front to back, and on intel's reference board the RAM is behind the processor, so it gets hot air passed over it. On the xserve, they are next to each other so the cooling is more effective. (That's just the point I remember.)

It may be that Apple's solution isn't the best out there -- I don't know that much about servers, the hardware side at least. But it's not just a load of commodity parts thrown together.
What the nerd community most often fail to realize is that all features aren't equal. A well implemented and well integrated feature in a convenient interface is worth way more than the same feature implemented crappy, or accessed through a annoying interface.
     
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Mar 5, 2009, 12:13 AM
 
I was at that WWDC... the Mac Pro people they had seemed mostly clueless... I think that was because everything except for the case was designed at Intel.
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besson3c
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Mar 5, 2009, 03:11 AM
 
Originally Posted by Amorya View Post
I was speaking to one of the xserve engineers at WWDC a few years back, when the intel xserve had just been launched. He was enthusing about how they put thought into every little aspect of the design process: for example, the airflow is front to back, and on intel's reference board the RAM is behind the processor, so it gets hot air passed over it. On the xserve, they are next to each other so the cooling is more effective. (That's just the point I remember.)

It may be that Apple's solution isn't the best out there -- I don't know that much about servers, the hardware side at least. But it's not just a load of commodity parts thrown together.

There is some engineering that has to go on to keep a server running cool and optimally, but there is far more of it that goes into a laptop than a 1U server. For starters, noise is not a big deal with a server, a 1U rack provides more space and height than a laptop, and bad power consumption is a little less evident.
     
goMac
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Mar 5, 2009, 03:57 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
There is some engineering that has to go on to keep a server running cool and optimally, but there is far more of it that goes into a laptop than a 1U server. For starters, noise is not a big deal with a server, a 1U rack provides more space and height than a laptop, and bad power consumption is a little less evident.
Actually, Apple has been pretty good about cramming high performance stuff into a 1U. For a long time, competitors could only offer the same packages in 2U's or 3U's, which is kind of a big deal when you're talking about shelf space...

When the original Xeon XServe came out it was a huge deal that they managed to fit that into 1U. I remember that being a huge talking point at WWDC.
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Mar 5, 2009, 06:10 AM
 
Yes, it was. At MacWorld Paris in 2003, many customers also liked the fact that they had four harddrive bays and they thought about replacing their towers with an XServe -- because they couldn't hear the noise. (They were put in well-isolated racks with a few XRaids that ran some looped script to make all the lights blink )
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Mar 4, 2010, 03:29 PM
 
I saw a few Xserves at the school today. They looked really neat!
     
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Mar 4, 2010, 04:54 PM
 
XServes only have 3 harddrive bays now.

XServes are priced competitively against servers with similar configurations, especially when you start adding Windows Server.
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Mar 4, 2010, 05:27 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
XServes only have 3 harddrive bays now.

XServes are priced competitively against servers with similar configurations, especially when you start adding Windows Server.

That's not saying much, the major PC vendors charge ridiculously high prices for low end servers, why go that route?

An XServe starts at around $3000, but you can build a server for literally half that price. In fact, I just built a 1U SuperMicro server for around $1500 that had 8 2.5" drive bays (and this $1500 included the price of the 8 320 gig drives), a Quad Core Xeon, etc.

The only advantages to a server from Apple/Dell/HP/whatever are the availability of their software support contracts, and 4 hour onsite hardware support availability. However, software support is very expensive, and onsite is around $1000 - how many times would you *need* this in the life cycle of the machine? If this downtime is going to kick your ass, maybe you shouldn't get a low-end server such as an XServe in the first place? It might just be better off to buy the extra parts from Apple and prepare to install them on your own in the event of a failure (not hard to do), but even then $1000 for a motherboard, power supply, and fans is pricy. You can get software contracts from Redhat or whomever else, although I haven't priced these.

I see the attraction here for newbie sysadmins who want to run OS X Server, but this does not make the XServe's hardware particularly good value. Maybe competitively priced against HP and Dell, but again, that ain't saying much.
     
olePigeon
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Mar 4, 2010, 06:15 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
An XServe starts at around $3000, but you can build a server for literally half that price. In fact, I just built a 1U SuperMicro server for around $1500 that had 8 2.5" drive bays (and this $1500 included the price of the 8 320 gig drives), a Quad Core Xeon, etc.
Yeah, but Windows Server 2008 with 25 CALs is $4000.

I guess you could save some money going with Linux, but for $1500 you don't need a masters in computer science to manage the OS X Server.

Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
It might just be better off to buy the extra parts from Apple and prepare to install them on your own in the event of a failure (not hard to do), but even then $1000 for a motherboard, power supply, and fans is pricy. You can get software contracts from Redhat or whomever else, although I haven't priced these.
Apple's support contract includes replacement parts. Short of the case itself, you can replace nearly every component inside the server.
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olePigeon
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Mar 4, 2010, 06:19 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
If this downtime is going to kick your ass, maybe you shouldn't get a low-end server such as an XServe in the first place?
Just out of curiosity, why is an XServe considered low end?
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Mar 4, 2010, 06:53 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Just out of curiosity, why is an XServe considered low end?
It has a GUI.
     
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Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Yeah, but Windows Server 2008 with 25 CALs is $4000.

I guess you could save some money going with Linux, but for $1500 you don't need a masters in computer science to manage the OS X Server.
That's a different argument though, and I don't disagree with you. I was simply disagreeing with the notion that the hardware is well priced. It is not.
     
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Mar 4, 2010, 07:09 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Just out of curiosity, why is an XServe considered low end?
This is a high end server, the two do not compare:

HP ProLiant DL700 Servers - comparison results Small & Medium Business - HP
     
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Originally Posted by TETENAL View Post
It has a GUI.
We are talking about the hardware alone, but I will say that no high end enterprise level sysadmin is dependent on there being a GUI, they all know their way around the CLI, if not working there exclusively. In many cases the CLI is a better option than the GUI for a number of reasons.

Apple's products are turnkey style products that are not really suitable for high level enterprise, unless you cluster a bunch of XServes together and use a different OS with them (which is what a lot of people do).
( Last edited by besson3c; Mar 4, 2010 at 07:39 PM. )
     
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Originally Posted by lexapro View Post
I saw a few Xserves at the school today. They looked really neat!
Wow, we're on a roll today.
     
 
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