Apple to discontinue Xserve after Jan. 31, 2011 - Page 3

If I was the head of Apple's business integration group I'd be resigning about now. With bonehead decisions such as this why bother???

Granted about the kernel, but what file system do linux and solaris use that is that much more advanced, is it the ill fated (on the mac platform) ZFS? Cause I can't believe something from linux like ext3 is that more advanced, but I could be wrong.

The whole point to a systems integrator is that they integrate systems. That means mixing and matching. IBM is successful at that because they recommend the best products for the purpose, rather than just recommend their own. It was one of the major reasons why they sold off their PC line, which was doing well. They even recommend Macs!

Unisys will do the same. Now they will be able to purchase Apple equipment at OEM pricing, and integrate it with other software and hardware, writing their own software in order to accomplish interoperability. OS X now works pretty well with other Servers from other companies, including Linux. I'm assuming that Apple now feels it no longer has to offer this line of equipment, because Unisys, and the other three companies Apple uses for this purpose will have them covered.

It's much easier to move into the secretary pool and upper management offices than into the server room, and I imagine that Apple is aware of this after years of trying in their halfhearted way.

Windows 2008 boxes...

Who Gives a **** !

People are not stupid. You buy what suits your needs. If you're under the impression that you need all redundant crap you just listed, then by all means, empty your pockets and buy what makes you feel safe.

Every one else, like for example, people buying their first server, will save thousands of dollars by buying a Mac mini or a Mac pro. Yes the mac pro saves you thousands of dollars as well by comparison to the Xserve currently available. Joke by comparison.

You pay twice as much for less performance, worse power consumption, and 1 U of space. Great. Enjoy.

Apple knows what it is doing. Their recent success proves that.

There is MUCH more money in the consumer market. The server market is all about specs. The consumer market is where the magic is, and that is what Apple is best at.

But, the big (unanswerable) question is would we have the iPod, iPhone, iPad CE devices and
the "always-connected" infrastructure (driving big server farms).

Or would multi-touch be relegated to a few thousand, expensive, big-assed tables?

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Wow. Fanboy blinders on much?

Perhaps you missed the point that Apple slowing but surely is TURNING THEIR BACK on the PC industry they helped found. Idiot.

No need to be rude. Thanks for the info on Unisys. I'll google it.

I rarely follow enterprise news in general.




Edit: So I looked it up. Yeah - Apple is trying to get big customers to adopt the iPhone. While that is certainly "enterprise" stuff, it is nevertheless a push for adoption of Apple's consumer tech, albeit using existing enterprise infrastructure.

I'm not sure how discontinuing the server has anything to do with iPhones, other than some kind of "big customer" nexus.

They just did, it's called the Mac Pro, you get 30% more performance from the highest end configuration, all solid state drives, uses less power, and is half the price. Mac pro maxes out at $18,000, the Xserve at $37,000. That's twice the price, for less performance....you figure it out....it's not hard.

Rack mount waaaa rack mount waaa.

This is also what systems intergators do. They provide support for the solutions they provide. That usually includes hardware and software support. So Apple will have to do little more that training for Unisys personell, and parts.

Yet you comment on it? He was certainly NOT being rude in the slightest.

ZFS is a truly killer multiuser nonclustered filesystem. I won't delve into detail, but it has many, many features that put it far ahead of HFS+, NTFS, ext3, etc in terms of flexibility and robustness. Shame Apple didn't adopt it, it's ported to FreeBSD, and should have been a shoe-in to OS X. Political.

The talk of this began in the 2006 time frame, so I don't see any of that as being a problem.

What does Mac OS X certification have to do with what servers Apple uses. IF you want to find out what actual server OS sits behind a service use something like

http://www.nmap.org/

and find out. I don't have to visit the server farm physically to see what server OS is being used.

If so, I apologize for being thin-skinned.

it's a add-on option... no different from the Mac Pro.

Please try not to talk anymore. It's pretty obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about. This is what happens when iPad users try to carry on an intelligent conversation with professionals.

"Redundant Crap".. LOL.. Gee, you sure know a lot about servers don't you Big Boy???? Have a nice life "enjoying your photographs and listening to music on your Magical device".. It appears that is all your skill set consists of...

That wasn't being rude. If people comment on things, they should first find out what's happening. Since this was all over the news about Apple, it would have been easy to find.

Although it's unlikely to do much good... Those of you that feel strongly enough about Apple's decision should post on this Apple Forum thread. Personally i'm gutted...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread....art=0&start=15

Beatle

I am constantly amazed at the number of folks here who not only don't get enterprise-level gear, but don't get that they don't get it... we really should have a 'pro' forum.

I, and I'm not alone, would easily pay $1000 extra for a server that simply has a power plug that won't pull out, as opposed to one that could. That's just one feature that differentiates a real server from a Mac Mini, f'rinstance. MagSafe my butt...

Waaah, I want my rackmount!

Well, what OS the firewall or load balancer is using, anyway...

By having those certifications it means you are actually trained in Server and know how to use it unlike most of the people who comment on here about a topic they know nothing about. Trust me if your software is saying Apple isn't using XServe's it's lying to you as if I was allowed I'd post pictures of it to prove you wrong.

Child, people may not be stupid, but you are revealing yourself as an idiot. What did you dress up as for Halloween, a BP drilling safety inspector?

DING DING DING we have a winner! Tell him what he's won.....

I keep quoting this. But as I also keep pointing out, times have changed. Back in 1997, Apple had all it could do to just stay in business, and the consumer was a much easier target for Apple's limited resourses.

Today, Apple could buy many of the companies involved.

In addition, the new question is; What is the desktop? It's no longer "the desktop". It's now smartphones and tablets. Both of them are having a far greater sales growth than are "computers". It's very possible that MS will finally lose the desktop wars sometime in the future if WP7 doesn't become one of the top two or three mobile computing solutions, because Windows tablets surely won't.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...cc120b3729ae36

Tell me! Tell me! Did I get a iPad????

My knee-jerk reaction to the decision to discontinue the XServe was: "Oh, No!"

After thinking about it and listening to (reading) others' thoughts -- I am beginning to think this is a good thing, No?

When you step back and think about it, Apple makes/builds very little of what it sells -- all the hardware in the iPad is manufactured and assembled by someone else (even the Apple-designed A4 processor).
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What sets apple apart is their ideas, design, quality, marketing... but mostly, their software.

Software is what Apple builds!

What you describe above is a way for Apple (through a known, established and respected 3rd party) to penetrate the back office while simultaneously marketing to the front office.

It is almost as if:

By getting out of the server hardware business -- Apple is able to get into the server business.

This might be a very good thing!

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I don't need a certification from Apple (or Microsoft or any other corporation) to know what I'm doing. I've been developing software for 15 years on big iron now and deploy to variety of UNIX servers to know what I'm talking about (I generally don't comment on things I know nothing or little about).

Apple WAS adopting it! In fact, they had (have?) a team that was contributing major code to it. It was finally an irreducible licensing disagreement that ended Apple's participation. But Ellison is one of Jobs' best friends, and Oracle has committed themselves to operating on OS X beginning years ago. Possible now that Oracle now owns ZFS, they and Apple can work it out.

I hope so.

Anyone that has dealt in server technology in the past few years know that virtualization is where servers are going anyway, there is no need to have 8 physical servers to do the work of one host with 8 virtuals on it. The Xserve offered nothing in storage capacity and offers nothing over what you can do with a Mac Pro. They are moving out of the server hardware business, this was clear when they discontinued the Xserve RAID a couple years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple starts officially supporting their software on a Virtual, we may see an increase on the price of the software to cover that though.

If the firewall is forwarding the port to the server (as it should otherwise the service on the server will not be available to the outside world) then it does not matter that there is a firewall in between. Same goes for load balancer.

Yes. If you don't need it, there's no reason to spend the big bucks on it, and if you do, then the big bucks don't matter.

Well then I guess there's a first time for everything as look at my track record on here for the last 6 years. Regardless Apple has a roadmap already out and it's going to stun people when they announce it.

They could still make specialized machines for themselves. This server farm seems big enough to warrant Apple creating a team for this task. It doesnt have to be as pretty or go through the same lengthy channels if they arent going to sell the HW.

My question is why are the discontinuing the Xserve? Are we focusing on a water droplet when there is a tidal wave of change behind it?

Is the Xserve just not selling and thats it (nothing more), or does this mean Apple will focus on cloud computing for the 21st century? It has the benefit of using Amazons s3 (and subsequently Dropbox) as models of successful cloud computing.

They already host a great deal of media content and dont seem to mind to pushing 600MB iPhone updates to fix a single PDF security issue. Its very green which is something Apple cares about, at least from a marketing standpoint.

For the icing on the cake, there is now a change in iOS 4.2 which allows you to create a free Apple ID when you access MobileMe in the settings. This indicates that their MobileMe service will at least offer some free service(s).

You can Rack mount a Mac Pro, it's the same case they used at Virginia Tech before the Xserve even existed.

The Mac Pro has available 12 CPU cores and support for 64 GB of RAM now, I'd rather run it on that anyway.

The latest tech is Virtual Machines. This means you setup a bunch of high-end blades and big SAN's and run something like VMWare VSphere. You can even virtualize switches and routers. What do you think Apple is going to put in that huge NC data center? If you said, XServes, you would be wrong.

Mac OS X Server can be run in a Virtual Machine with little to no difficulty.

Virtualizing data centers results in huge power and space savings. Why have a bunch of XServes where they are only utilizing 20-30% usage on each one while sucking immense amounts of power and expelling even more heat? Why not take a big rack of high-powered servers and push it to 98% utilization by filling it with hundreds of virtual servers. Two big racks running VSphere could replace 2-3 rows of single purpose server racks!

Virtual environments can dynamically allocate additional CPU's and more RAM. You pay to have say 4 CPU's for a hosted app but if you need 12 CPU's for month end processing, the system can automatically provide extra CPU's as you need them on the fly. You can also shutdown blades you are not using. When you need the extra processing power, you can wake those extra blades from sleep mode and engage them.

That said, I bought a 6-Core MacPro recently, so I could run VMWare Fusion and use it like a virtual lab. I can run multiple instances of Microsoft Server 2008 R2 and several Win7 VM's all at the same time and test out many endless scenarios. I can also throw Ubuntu and Solaris into the mix. Certainly beats needing to buy 5-6 PC's and virtual management of the VM's is so much faster and easier. Booting from an ISO loading off an SSD is crazy fast to load a new OS into a VM! Install time for unattended Win7 is like 15min!