Apple to discontinue Xserve after Jan. 31, 2011 - Page 5

Originally Posted by Wiggin

The iPod really exploded when they began offering multiple models. .

Originally Posted by kwatson

Apple... now officially a toymaker.

Originally Posted by Steve-J

Is this what Apple will run in its server farm?

Originally Posted by Quadra 610

It won't disappear. It will change. Apple is driving innovation in the consumer sector.

Macs, iPads, iOS.

The first real stroke is the new Air.

Don't you get it?

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

I think that everybody's desktop lines will disappear in 5-10 years.

Sure, there will be existing installations! But the new solutions being marketed will not place a desktop (or floortop) at every workstation.

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Originally Posted by Steve-J

I don't get it at all. You say the Air is the first real stroke. The point is that this will make it so the desktop does not disappear.

I don't get it at all. Could you explain?

Originally Posted by Johnny Mozzarella

Apple should replace the XServe with the iServe.

Originally Posted by TBell

Many people and companies are using the mac mini's as servers. There are companies that have hundreds of them on racks connected together. The mini probably was stealing the X-serve's business. You can get almost three mini's configured to be servers for the price of an x-serve. Further, there is software that let's you hook them up to work as a single unit.

Originally Posted by Steve-J

It makes perfect sense. It is unlikely that they make much money from that product line.

Next to be discontinued: High end Mac workstations.

Originally Posted by screamingfist

'bye bye'? they never were in the enterprise. they never worked at getting in the enterprise and no one really uses them except for here and there a lonely xserv ha.
they needed to just stop pretending they could compete and get out.
they are a 'mobile' company now anyway right?

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

Apple included a trial ZFS implementation in a prior OS X. I played with it a bit across several Macs and external HDDs.

I think Apple abandoned it for several reasons:

-- it was overkill for the requirements of most Mac users
-- Apple couldn't figure out how to simplify the complexity with a GUI to make it usable to any but the most technical Mac users

I am surprised/disappointed it is not part of OS X Server.

Originally Posted by kwatson

I agree with all except the last bit.

Originally Posted by jasenj1

The official transition document from Apple. Note the performance difference between the mini & the Xserve.

http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L...erve_Guide.pdf

Originally Posted by pondosinatra

Along with refusing to put a floppy in the original Mac, and outrageous pricing on the NeXT product line - this has to be Steve's most boneheaded move.

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

I totally disagree!

Desktops? DESKTOPS? We don't need no stinkin' desktops!

.

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum

.

What rill they use in Apple server farms?

.

Originally Posted by Bibbler

Wow Golly Gee!! What an intelligent post - "We don't need no stinkin' desktops!"

No I suppose YOU never will need no stinkin desktop. Have fun enjoying your movies, photographs, and listening to music on your iPad!!!!!

Originally Posted by maccherry

You sound thrilled! Must be happy Apple saved your effing job security. Anybody in the know knows that if Apple wanted to play the disposable server game they could.
The server business is a dump that keeps a bunch of high paid techs employed.
laugh at that!

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Well, unsurprisingly, lots of wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.

<sigh>

This is both an expected and rational move. There are several factors at play here that make this move make sense:

1. This product was likely not very profitable and a distraction from Apple's larger strategy.

2. Apple does/will offer a small business/office "server" solution in the form of the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (server configuration...announced today).

3. More and more things are moving to the "cloud". Apple recognizes this and provides some (and likely more in the future) cloud-based services.

4. The data center is actually well-served by many other vendors. Apple likely didn't feel they could add a whole lot in that space.

And there are probably other contributing factors.

As to whether they will get out of the desktop business? To early to tell. I could see the Mac Pro line dwindling down and disappearing in a few years. I could also see some streamlining of the MacBook line.

Originally Posted by Market_Player

We ( the company I work for ) recently installed 250 Xserves for a mission critical project in the Oil Sands of Alberta; we could not be happier with the results.

Security of the OS is second to non right now, and the labour cost was cut 77% after replacing Windows Server and our systems have been on an unprecedented 100% up time from where we were before.

I sure hope that Apple will licence out OS X Server after this fiasco is over with.

Originally Posted by solipsism

1) Learn the origins of such paraphrasing that is done for comic effect. They will show up again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lj056ao6GE 2) Saying that satellite computing devices will outnumber typical PCs is not some farfetched notion. iOS devices (which you refer to as iToys) already outnumber the number of Macs sold by 6 to 1. If we look at all other major PC makers and MS, they are all focusing their attention on satellite computing.

3) Dicks statement isnt saying that desktop computers will go away completely, but that our reliance on them as our primary means of communicating digitally will wane. This is the nature of all tech. Paradigm shifts do happen and with mobile computing getting more robust there simply is less need for the average person to have PC in every room. We already had this shift from desktops to notebooks, now were seeing this with handheld devices that suit the majority of casual computing needs.

4) I predict well see an upsurge of desktops as the single, powerful, stationary computer, with multiple smartphones and tablets in a household serving a multitude of satellite computing needs. Even the TV will get involved in future of computing.

Originally Posted by Goldenclaw

Maybe they'll introduce a new Mac Pro which just happens to be 1U or 2U...


lol

Originally Posted by rbryanh

So it turns out the fundamentalist Windo-philes were right all along: Apple is primarily interested in producing gorgeous high-profit consumer gadgets and doesn't take the needs of IT pros seriously.

OS X Server has long been the neglected stepsister of Apple's lineup. Now that there will be no grownup hardware on which to run it, it's not hard to see where it's headed... out of the cinders, out of the kitchen, off the estate, and into an unmarked grave.

Ah well... As it turns out, learning OS X Server was really about learning a rather restricted, overpriced Unix box with a few not terribly powerful, notably unreliable admin interfaces on a horribly slow development cycle. New releases that decrease functionality, bugs that linger for years, and a billion ads for one iThingie after another on the side of every city bus on the planet...

It's an abusive relationship I should have dumped years ago.

Not that I'm going to thank 'em for forcing the issue.

Originally Posted by signguysigns

Apple’s decision to discontinue the Xserve is probably the worst decision Apple made in along time, and it will come back to bite them – hard I hope.

If Apple thinks that the Mac Mini Server can be compared to the Xserve, then they don’t have a clue what the Xserve means to the IT world. First, the Mac Mini doesn’t even come close to the processing power of the Xserve. Not to mention, the RAM in the Mac Mini maxes out at 8 GB whereas the Xserve is 96 GB with 10.6 installed. Then there is the hard drive configuration. Albeit you can mirror two hard drives, that is not the same as RAID 5; you will have to go to some external storage device after you max the internal hard drive out at 500 GB. If you append an external storage device, then you can only concatenate it to the Mini via USB or Firewire; both are considered bad practices for corporate use. There are many other technical disadvantages for the Mac Mini Server when compared to the Xserve when it is used in a corporate environment; however, when it comes to servers of any kind, you don’t want it to shout out “I’m a single point of failure.” The Mac Mini Server says that loud and clear in every aspect of its makeup.

Apple is also saying that the Mac Pro is an alternative to the Xserve. I really do like the Mac Pro. It is a well built and rock-solid computer with many upgradeable components. With more internal drive bays than the Xserve, and you can also add a solid-state drive to it, the Mac Pro has a better internal storage option and a higher storage capacity than the Xserve. Processors in both computers are tit for tat as well. So why not the Mac Pro as an alternative to the Xserve? It is not practical when it comes to mounting it in a rack. With a rack mount kit, you can lay the Mac Pro horizontally and that will use about seven units of rack space. If you left it standing vertically in the rack, you will use about 12U of rack space. Therefore, I hope you have lots of racks because if you have as many servers as I do along with other devices such as a 4U tape library, Xserve RAID (which was another good product Apple did away with), and APC battery backups, you will run out of space fast. The Mac Pro does not have lights out management capabilities. In its current form factor, the Mac Pro can only have one power supply. The absence of LOM and dual power supplies make the Mac Pro inferior to the Xserve. Again, as good as the Mac Pro is, it is not a good corporate solution as an alternative to the Xserve. It does not fit in the server room.

I conclude this by saying to Apple, if you are going to do away with the Xserve than you might as well slap all who supported the Mac in businesses, schools, colleges, and government in the face. Not only are you slapping us in the face, but you are putting a lot of doubt in our minds about Apple’s long term plans for Mac OS X Server software. Give me a good reason why I should continue down Apple’s server road when you are continually discontinuing what I will call your enterprise product line? Right now I can’t trust Apple on whether they will someday discontinue server software or some other product I rely on in business. I really feel as if Apple just called me STUPID for buying their product.

Originally Posted by lylehm

Awful time to kill this product with such short notice. This is budget time and the MacPro and mini aren't suitable Xserve replacements in our environment. Globally, I don't fault Apple on this decision - it's theirs to make. However, in my little world, this means a scramble on our near and long term strategies. We're big enough to have plenty of Xserves, but too small to get any good 'NDA' strategic info from Apple. Not knowing what's on the horizon makes this all the more painful.

Certainly, I should be hammering out a plan for the future of Apple in our server room (and by extension, within our entire organization) instead of wasting time posting in a forum while 'on the clock.' Perhaps I'll feel better after some venting.

In the realm of speculation (outside of the burdens of my budgeting responsibilities), I'm very interested to see what the next move will be. I expect the Xserve's demise, as the Xserve RAID before it, are part of a larger strategy. It's exciting to consider the likes of HP (any good Tier 1 vendor) offering an Apple-licensed OS X solution - be it a direct install with a real EFI, or within a bundled VM. That seems to be a popular concept in this forum and fits with the Apple/Promise scenario.

Using Apple hardware, I could imagine the MacMini as a variation of the blade server concept. I picture a Mini with Light Peak that slides into a rack-mountable docking-chasis. Thus, instead of redundancy in the form of a robust single server, you get redundancy with distributed VMs on swappable Minis.

I'd be more jazzed to see where this news is really leading if the announcement itself wasn't such a poop on my parade. Yeah, I didn't have anything else to do.

I see some people post the word 'fail' as some cocky judgement of Apple's decision-making. In this case, I'm afraid the risk of failure falls squarely on my adaptability within the realm of my platform-choice.

Originally Posted by Onhka

Where the hell have you and the rest of the idiots been.

Apple announced their new Mac Pro Server early this morning. http://www.apple.com/xserve/

And even AppleInsider published the story at 9:40 AM:
Apple offers new Mac Pro Server configuration to replace Xserve http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...ce_xserve.html

Originally Posted by jragosta

...NeXT ended up earning hundreds of millions of dollars for Jobs (billions if you count his profits on Apple stock)...

With failures like those, who needs winners?

Originally Posted by Market_Player

...We ( the company I work for ) recently installed 250 Xserves for a mission critical project in the Oil Sands of Alberta; we could not be happier with the results...

Originally Posted by alexkhan2000

Ah, finally a refreshing voice of reason on this convoluted thread.

Originally Posted by alexkhan2000

I never understood why Apple even bothered with the X-Serve and it makes perfect sense for Apple to shed a product line that doesn't add to the company's overall value chain. Apple is a provider of client products. Apple is a consumer electronics company that also provides content. That's where their focus needs to be.

Originally Posted by alexkhan2000

Apple's internal IT and data center needs are provided by a hodge-podge of IBM/AIX, Sun/Solaris, Red Hat Linux, customized UNIX, Oracle, SAP, even Windows, etc. These are systems that would cost tens of millions of dollars. Just do a search of Apple's job listings that Apple is trying to fill on the IT side and there is hardly any mention of the X-Serve or the Mac OS X Server at all. It's mainly heavy duty enterprise backend stuff dominated by IBM, Linux, SAP and Oracle/Sun.

Originally Posted by alexkhan2000

Apple's push into the enterprise is for the adoption of the iPhone, iPad and, to a degree, Macs, but it's mainly about mobile. Apple hired Unisys to help large enterprises integrate the mobile devices into their IT infrastructure. Again, it's about the client side, not the server backend. Apple is not going to compete with the likes IBM, HP, Fujitsu, NEC, Dell and Sun, etc on this end. What is the point? It's just not Apple's area of expertise.

Originally Posted by alexkhan2000

What value would Apple add on the server side when cheap generic Wintel or Linux machines can do much more for much less? Industrial design, the look and feel, the user experience and the ecosystem mean nothing in this space. Let's remember what happened to Sun. The server machines have become commoditized. That's why the likes of IBM, HP and Dell are focusing on software, storage, networking equipment, and services like consultation and systems integration. They can't grow or rely on the increasingly thin margins of the server hardware. And unlike on the consumer client side of things, Apple has absolutely nothing to add to the value chain there.