That doesn't make sense. For a company with 20-200 employees, you probably don't need more power than a single Mac Pro. If they would allow an xserve into their server room, why not a Mac Pro server?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wooster101
And you of course know me and my customers needs...?
I'm reading that he asked a question about you and your customers and you didn't answer.
And you of course know me and my customers needs...?
Easy to sit behind your iToy and write things that you have no clue about.
As I said before - I do not need a server with and Apple logo on - I need a rack mountable server I can run Mac OS X Server on. Apple must provide us with some real alternatives not this marketing BS that the transition guide is.
Why do you think you 'need' an os x server? you are one of the few. servers don't get flashed around like phones and laptops so the reality field isn't so distorted around apples xserv and os x server product. IT shops tend to look at it with a more objective eye. and the truth is: it ain't worth it, no real reason to use it.
Apple's out of the business because of no profits, and no long-term vision (for the enterprise market). Apple's enterprise team has been very consistent at not 'getting it'.
And on the second, consumers don't expect rights and obligations - but enterprise users _do_. One of the points Apple, and many here, don't 'get'.
How many large enterprise customers does apple have with large scale xserve deployments? Their minuscule market share shows there can't be very many. The obstacles here for any savvy administrator with a few of these servers to transition to a Mac pro server are minor annoyances with simple work arounds. The only thing you can't overcome is the loss of redundant power and if it's mission critical it should be in a two node ha config anyway at the very least.
Why do you think you 'need' an os x server? you are one of the few. servers don't get flashed around like phones and laptops so the reality field isn't so distorted around apples xserv and os x server product. IT shops tend to look at it with a more objective eye. and the truth is: it ain't worth it, no real reason to use it.
Have you used one? The Xserve (more accurately: OS X Server)'s main problem is marketing and acceptance. For those of us that know them, they make a fantastically easy to use package for critical services like DNS, LDAP, AFS/CIFS, VPNs, collabware, and such. All this can be done on other machines/OSes, but as a back-end to a company full of Macs, they're perfect.
My take is, if Apple wants to fill a company with Macs, then having Xserve supports that initiative in spades. Unfortunately, this move tells me that's not what Apple wants. The Mac as we know it is on the way out, and closed iDevices are going to come in waves.
I think its absolutely hilarious that Apple is turning into a closed ecosystem, the polar opposite of what they promoted in their 1984 Superbowl ad. Apple does indeed want to be Big Brother.
Why do you think you 'need' an os x server? you are one of the few. servers don't get flashed around like phones and laptops so the reality field isn't so distorted around apples xserv and os x server product. IT shops tend to look at it with a more objective eye. and the truth is: it ain't worth it, no real reason to use it.
So Apple should abandon Mac OS X Server too? Is that what you mean?
I´m am not against using other server software and I do but for many things Mac Os X Server is the simplest and easiest / cheepest way to do it.
But try to setup a Open Directory Master with VPN, Radius, AFP portable home folders and Kerberos single sign on in less than two hours on Linux...
Yeah - I NEED Mac OS X Server to do my job fast and efficient and this let me do it.
We don't use OS X Server for stuff like DNS DHCP VPN and other services that can be better served with lInux and Windows servers. What we do need it for is Software update server, OD, work group management, and special DAM software that needs Applescript support to interact with Adobe software and office. We can't do that stuff with Windows and Linux. We might have to look into having a Windows contingency plan that uses an alternate scripting, preserves extended attributes, serves AFP volumes to Mac clients well, and migrate to AD. I guess it's doable, but you bet it'll cost $$$.
So Apple should abandon Mac OS X Server too? Is that what you mean?
I´m am not against using other server software and I do but for many things Mac Os X Server is the simplest and easiest / cheepest way to do it.
But try to setup a Open Directory Master with VPN, Radius, AFP portable home folders and Kerberos single sign on in less than two hours on Linux...
Yeah - I NEED Mac OS X Server to do my job fast and efficient and this let me do it.
yes, if you are in a mac only or mac mostly shop then of course their server product will be easiest to use. same thing goes for MS products in a MS shop.
Have you used one? The Xserve (more accurately: OS X Server)'s main problem is marketing and acceptance. For those of us that know them, they make a fantastically easy to use package for critical services like DNS, LDAP, AFS/CIFS, VPNs, collabware, and such. All this can be done on other machines/OSes, but as a back-end to a company full of Macs, they're perfect.
My take is, if Apple wants to fill a company with Macs, then having Xserve supports that initiative in spades. Unfortunately, this move tells me that's not what Apple wants. The Mac as we know it is on the way out, and closed iDevices are going to come in waves.
I think its absolutely hilarious that Apple is turning into a closed ecosystem, the polar opposite of what they promoted in their 1984 Superbowl ad. Apple does indeed want to be Big Brother.
yes.
and yes, in a mac shop os x server is a nice thing.
too bad you bought into that ad. steve jobs has never been about 'open'. he is all about control.
We don't use OS X Server for stuff like DNS DHCP VPN and other services that can be better served with lInux and Windows servers. What we do need it for is Software update server, OD, work group management, and special DAM software that needs Applescript support to interact with Adobe software and office. We can't do that stuff with Windows and Linux. We might have to look into having a Windows contingency plan that uses an alternate scripting, preserves extended attributes, serves AFP volumes to Mac clients well, and migrate to AD. I guess it's doable, but you bet it'll cost $$$.
Yup, should have said OD instead of LDAP - and totally agree about Software Update Server and DAM stuff - very supportive of Mac environments.
All I said was that Apple has found that they weren't selling enough rack mounted servers to justify staying in the business. So the number of people who were willing to pay for Xserve wasn't significant.
As for your demands, too bad. Apple has no obligation to give YOU what you want. They are a business and their job is to participate in markets where they can make money. Your whining is the same as the people who used to demand that Apple give them a $399 computer - or let them install OS X on generic hardware. You have no such right - and Apple has no such obligation.
I was going to post an insulting post in response to your extremely vapid claims of what should be in a server room, but instead I'll post a serious answer.
Why do we need 1u servers in a server room? You claim that one Mac Pro should be enough for anybody, even companies with 200 employees.
Let's look at why a typical company and what type of company will use XServes. A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
Now, that school district/college will need to host these servers somewhere locally, because they know that some cloud service will not handle the bandwidth or the specific needs for their institution. They need the reliability of the system being there for their students and they need to be able to tailor it to their needs.
They will usually have a server room, or more often their own servers hosted in a local co-location facility. No normal data-center will allow what are essentially home and desktop machines into a server room, for a number of reasons.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
Yet another reason is the size and the ability to swap out drives and power supplies while the machine is running. Mac minis have nothing and once they die, everything that is dependent on them will die too. Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac minis cannot fit fibre channel networking equipment, which you need for connecting to RAID systems. Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
Now what about another area where people use XServes heavily, video post production houses. A lot of these have server rooms full of XServes, upon which they use XSan in conjunction with large RAID systems for networked storage and Apple's Final Cut Pro Server. They cannot put Mac Pros in their server rooms for the simple fact that there is no space. They have a mission critical requirement that their servers are up and running 24/7. You can't do that with consumer grade machines.
You may think that because your small office has a Mac-mini or Mac Pro tucked away in a corner room that that is enough for everybody.
There are thousands of companies for whom this isn't the case.
In my company's particular case, we've had a long bitter weekend where we've decided that we've had enough of Apple's lack of commitment to its professional customers.
- No more Java updates, and no commitment from anyone yet as to whether there will ever be updates. You don't know how many people use OSX to develop Java on, tens of thousands.
- No more Xserve and only two months in which to do something about it.
- Apple's hysterical public fights with major software vendors like Adobe over trivial rubbish. There are literally millions of Mac users who use Adobe's products daily and upon which they depend for their livelihoods. We have no assurance that Apple won't try to kill off Adobe's products as well. We don't think so, but we have no confidence whatsoever in Apple any more.
- Supporting Apple's clients with Windows or Linux servers for even basic things like file or directory services is not easy or in many cases even practical.
So we've decided to migrate our entire company to Windows client and server over the next few years. We're doing this with a heavy heart, but Microsoft is simply far more reliable than Apple is - They have a very good product roadmap and they have very good legacy support for products they no longer make.
And judging form the comments on the various boards where IT administrators are talking about this, we're far from the only ones who're going down this path.
Sad, sad weekend, but I think it's been coming for a long time.
How many large enterprise customers does apple have with large scale xserve deployments? Their minuscule market share shows there can't be very many. The obstacles here for any savvy administrator with a few of these servers to transition to a Mac pro server are minor annoyances with simple work arounds. The only thing you can't overcome is the loss of redundant power and if it's mission critical it should be in a two node ha config anyway at the very least.
Read my post further up. This simply isn't realistic or practical.
I was going to post an insulting post in response to your extremely vapid claims of what should be in a server room, but instead I'll post a serious answer.
Why do we need 1u servers in a server room? You claim that one Mac Pro should be enough for anybody, even companies with 200 employees.
Let's look at why a typical company and what type of company will use XServes. A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
Now, that school district/college will need to host these servers somewhere locally, because they know that some cloud service will not handle the bandwidth or the specific needs for their institution. They need the reliability of the system being there for their students and they need to be able to tailor it to their needs.
They will usually have a server room, or more often their own servers hosted in a local co-location facility. No normal data-center will allow what are essentially home and desktop machines into a server room, for a number of reasons.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
Yet another reason is the size and the ability to swap out drives and power supplies while the machine is running. Mac minis have nothing and once they die, everything that is dependent on them will die too. Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac minis cannot fit fibre channel networking equipment, which you need for connecting to RAID systems. Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
Now what about another area where people use XServes heavily, video post production houses. A lot of these have server rooms full of XServes, upon which they use XSan in conjunction with large RAID systems for networked storage and Apple's Final Cut Pro Server. They cannot put Mac Pros in their server rooms for the simple fact that there is no space. They have a mission critical requirement that their servers are up and running 24/7. You can't do that with consumer grade machines.
You may think that because your small office has a Mac-mini or Mac Pro tucked away in a corner room that that is enough for everybody.
There are thousands of companies for whom this isn't the case.
In my company's particular case, we've had a long bitter weekend where we've decided that we've had enough of Apple's lack of commitment to its professional customers.
- No more Java updates, and no commitment from anyone yet as to whether there will ever be updates. You don't know how many people use OSX to develop Java on, tens of thousands.
- No more Xserve and only two months in which to do something about it.
- Apple's hysterical public fights with major software vendors like Adobe over trivial rubbish. There are literally millions of Mac users who use Adobe's products daily and upon which they depend for their livelihoods. We have no assurance that Apple won't try to kill off Adobe's products as well. We don't think so, but we have no confidence whatsoever in Apple any more.
- Supporting Apple's clients with Windows or Linux servers for even basic things like file or directory services is not easy or in many cases even practical.
So we've decided to migrate our entire company to Windows client and server over the next few years. We're doing this with a heavy heart, but Microsoft is simply far more reliable than Apple is - They have a very good product roadmap and they have very good legacy support for products they no longer make.
And judging form the comments on the various boards where IT administrators are talking about this, we're far from the only ones who're going down this path.
Sad, sad weekend, but I think it's been coming for a long time.
I understand!
Is it possible that your company is overreacting and abandoning a working solution for an unfamiliar and costly migration to a potential solution?
Would your decision be different if Apple licenses OS X Server to, say, IBM, and uses proven integrators like Unisys? This could offer your company a better solution than you currently enjoy -- e.g. 24/7 4 hour response service.
I don't think Apple handled this very well!
As an AAPL shareholder and Apple amature-evangelist I hope Apple resolves this to your and others' satisfaction.
Thanks for taking the time to post the issues your organization is encountering.
Quote:
Originally Posted by theolein
Read my post further up. This simply isn't realistic or practical.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
If your serving your company's web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki, possibly netboot, user homes etc etc from one single server, redundant power is only going to save you a downtime in an extremely small percentage of hardware failure scenarios. Clustering these services or at the very least setting up some kind of multi-node high availability fail over configuration would achieve higher up time numbers in the event of hardware failure. A bad power supply doesn't have to cause a downtime if you use clustering or high availability software even without redundant power in the same server.
Quote:
Originally Posted by theolein
Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
You can buy shelves for server racks. You can rack mount two Mac Pro Servers on a shelf vertically. This will take up 12U in the rack.
I was going to post an insulting post in response to your extremely vapid claims of what should be in a server room, but instead I'll post a serious answer.
Why do we need 1u servers in a server room? You claim that one Mac Pro should be enough for anybody, even companies with 200 employees.
Let's look at why a typical company and what type of company will use XServes. A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
Now, that school district/college will need to host these servers somewhere locally, because they know that some cloud service will not handle the bandwidth or the specific needs for their institution. They need the reliability of the system being there for their students and they need to be able to tailor it to their needs.
They will usually have a server room, or more often their own servers hosted in a local co-location facility. No normal data-center will allow what are essentially home and desktop machines into a server room, for a number of reasons.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
Yet another reason is the size and the ability to swap out drives and power supplies while the machine is running. Mac minis have nothing and once they die, everything that is dependent on them will die too. Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac minis cannot fit fibre channel networking equipment, which you need for connecting to RAID systems. Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
Now what about another area where people use XServes heavily, video post production houses. A lot of these have server rooms full of XServes, upon which they use XSan in conjunction with large RAID systems for networked storage and Apple's Final Cut Pro Server. They cannot put Mac Pros in their server rooms for the simple fact that there is no space. They have a mission critical requirement that their servers are up and running 24/7. You can't do that with consumer grade machines.
You may think that because your small office has a Mac-mini or Mac Pro tucked away in a corner room that that is enough for everybody.
There are thousands of companies for whom this isn't the case.
In my company's particular case, we've had a long bitter weekend where we've decided that we've had enough of Apple's lack of commitment to its professional customers.
- No more Java updates, and no commitment from anyone yet as to whether there will ever be updates. You don't know how many people use OSX to develop Java on, tens of thousands.
- No more Xserve and only two months in which to do something about it.
- Apple's hysterical public fights with major software vendors like Adobe over trivial rubbish. There are literally millions of Mac users who use Adobe's products daily and upon which they depend for their livelihoods. We have no assurance that Apple won't try to kill off Adobe's products as well. We don't think so, but we have no confidence whatsoever in Apple any more.
- Supporting Apple's clients with Windows or Linux servers for even basic things like file or directory services is not easy or in many cases even practical.
So we've decided to migrate our entire company to Windows client and server over the next few years. We're doing this with a heavy heart, but Microsoft is simply far more reliable than Apple is - They have a very good product roadmap and they have very good legacy support for products they no longer make.
And judging form the comments on the various boards where IT administrators are talking about this, we're far from the only ones who're going down this path.
Sad, sad weekend, but I think it's been coming for a long time.
Basically sums up my situation with our company and many of our customers
1) it is not commercially viable for Apple to create server hardware. It's 5% profit business and Apple has lost enthusiasm for competing in such markets.
2) Apple could irritate some people in the enterprise community by discontinuing the server hardware. The Mac Pro is a beast of a workstation but not a server product. That irritation could limit the use of Macs as client machines in Enterprise environments.
Surely the right solution is to licence Mac OS X Server to a partner hardware vendor?
If your serving your company's web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki, possibly netboot, user homes etc etc from one single server, redundant power is only going to save you a downtime in an extremely small percentage of hardware failure scenarios. Clustering these services or at the very least setting up some kind of multi-node high availability fail over configuration would achieve higher up time numbers in the event of hardware failure. A bad power supply doesn't have to cause a downtime if you use clustering or high availability software even without redundant power in the same server.
You can buy shelves for server racks. You can rack mount two Mac Pro Servers on a shelf vertically. This will take up 12U in the rack.
This all true, but it still involves workarounds that we are not comfortable with. Having to use a combination of SNMP and a Raritan power management device is fine, but involves more effort and cost compared to the ease of use of a solution like Apple's LOM.
In addition to this Mac Pros simply do not fit in our racks in the number in which we need them.
In short, again, neither the Mac pro nor the Mac mini is an acceptable solution.
Comments
That doesn't make sense. For a company with 20-200 employees, you probably don't need more power than a single Mac Pro. If they would allow an xserve into their server room, why not a Mac Pro server?
And you of course know me and my customers needs...?
I'm reading that he asked a question about you and your customers and you didn't answer.
And you of course know me and my customers needs...?
Easy to sit behind your iToy and write things that you have no clue about.
As I said before - I do not need a server with and Apple logo on - I need a rack mountable server I can run Mac OS X Server on. Apple must provide us with some real alternatives not this marketing BS that the transition guide is.
Why do you think you 'need' an os x server? you are one of the few. servers don't get flashed around like phones and laptops so the reality field isn't so distorted around apples xserv and os x server product. IT shops tend to look at it with a more objective eye. and the truth is: it ain't worth it, no real reason to use it.
Ding! You are correct on both counts, IMHO.
Apple's out of the business because of no profits, and no long-term vision (for the enterprise market). Apple's enterprise team has been very consistent at not 'getting it'.
And on the second, consumers don't expect rights and obligations - but enterprise users _do_. One of the points Apple, and many here, don't 'get'.
How many large enterprise customers does apple have with large scale xserve deployments? Their minuscule market share shows there can't be very many. The obstacles here for any savvy administrator with a few of these servers to transition to a Mac pro server are minor annoyances with simple work arounds. The only thing you can't overcome is the loss of redundant power and if it's mission critical it should be in a two node ha config anyway at the very least.
Why do you think you 'need' an os x server? you are one of the few. servers don't get flashed around like phones and laptops so the reality field isn't so distorted around apples xserv and os x server product. IT shops tend to look at it with a more objective eye. and the truth is: it ain't worth it, no real reason to use it.
Have you used one? The Xserve (more accurately: OS X Server)'s main problem is marketing and acceptance. For those of us that know them, they make a fantastically easy to use package for critical services like DNS, LDAP, AFS/CIFS, VPNs, collabware, and such. All this can be done on other machines/OSes, but as a back-end to a company full of Macs, they're perfect.
My take is, if Apple wants to fill a company with Macs, then having Xserve supports that initiative in spades. Unfortunately, this move tells me that's not what Apple wants. The Mac as we know it is on the way out, and closed iDevices are going to come in waves.
I think its absolutely hilarious that Apple is turning into a closed ecosystem, the polar opposite of what they promoted in their 1984 Superbowl ad. Apple does indeed want to be Big Brother.
Why do you think you 'need' an os x server? you are one of the few. servers don't get flashed around like phones and laptops so the reality field isn't so distorted around apples xserv and os x server product. IT shops tend to look at it with a more objective eye. and the truth is: it ain't worth it, no real reason to use it.
So Apple should abandon Mac OS X Server too? Is that what you mean?
I´m am not against using other server software and I do but for many things Mac Os X Server is the simplest and easiest / cheepest way to do it.
But try to setup a Open Directory Master with VPN, Radius, AFP portable home folders and Kerberos single sign on in less than two hours on Linux...
Yeah - I NEED Mac OS X Server to do my job fast and efficient and this let me do it.
i know a university made a super computer with a room full of g5's i guess room utilization isn't the end all be all
So Apple should abandon Mac OS X Server too? Is that what you mean?
I´m am not against using other server software and I do but for many things Mac Os X Server is the simplest and easiest / cheepest way to do it.
But try to setup a Open Directory Master with VPN, Radius, AFP portable home folders and Kerberos single sign on in less than two hours on Linux...
Yeah - I NEED Mac OS X Server to do my job fast and efficient and this let me do it.
yes, if you are in a mac only or mac mostly shop then of course their server product will be easiest to use. same thing goes for MS products in a MS shop.
Have you used one? The Xserve (more accurately: OS X Server)'s main problem is marketing and acceptance. For those of us that know them, they make a fantastically easy to use package for critical services like DNS, LDAP, AFS/CIFS, VPNs, collabware, and such. All this can be done on other machines/OSes, but as a back-end to a company full of Macs, they're perfect.
My take is, if Apple wants to fill a company with Macs, then having Xserve supports that initiative in spades. Unfortunately, this move tells me that's not what Apple wants. The Mac as we know it is on the way out, and closed iDevices are going to come in waves.
I think its absolutely hilarious that Apple is turning into a closed ecosystem, the polar opposite of what they promoted in their 1984 Superbowl ad. Apple does indeed want to be Big Brother.
yes.
and yes, in a mac shop os x server is a nice thing.
too bad you bought into that ad. steve jobs has never been about 'open'. he is all about control.
so how do you stack a "pro" don't most server users "stack these" for efficient air flow and access, space efficiency??
i know a university made a super computer with a room full of g5's i guess room utilization isn't the end all be all
That was a necessity before the G5 Xserve, and the cost was well above what most enterprises would afford. Uni grants can be quite amazing sometimes!
We don't use OS X Server for stuff like DNS DHCP VPN and other services that can be better served with lInux and Windows servers. What we do need it for is Software update server, OD, work group management, and special DAM software that needs Applescript support to interact with Adobe software and office. We can't do that stuff with Windows and Linux. We might have to look into having a Windows contingency plan that uses an alternate scripting, preserves extended attributes, serves AFP volumes to Mac clients well, and migrate to AD. I guess it's doable, but you bet it'll cost $$$.
Yup, should have said OD instead of LDAP - and totally agree about Software Update Server and DAM stuff - very supportive of Mac environments.
"Apple, Please don't give up the battle for macs in industry! Remember those of us stuck behind enemy lines!"
look in the trash
take a picture of the boxes
I never said I know your customers' needs.
All I said was that Apple has found that they weren't selling enough rack mounted servers to justify staying in the business. So the number of people who were willing to pay for Xserve wasn't significant.
As for your demands, too bad. Apple has no obligation to give YOU what you want. They are a business and their job is to participate in markets where they can make money. Your whining is the same as the people who used to demand that Apple give them a $399 computer - or let them install OS X on generic hardware. You have no such right - and Apple has no such obligation.
I was going to post an insulting post in response to your extremely vapid claims of what should be in a server room, but instead I'll post a serious answer.
Why do we need 1u servers in a server room? You claim that one Mac Pro should be enough for anybody, even companies with 200 employees.
Let's look at why a typical company and what type of company will use XServes. A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
Now, that school district/college will need to host these servers somewhere locally, because they know that some cloud service will not handle the bandwidth or the specific needs for their institution. They need the reliability of the system being there for their students and they need to be able to tailor it to their needs.
They will usually have a server room, or more often their own servers hosted in a local co-location facility. No normal data-center will allow what are essentially home and desktop machines into a server room, for a number of reasons.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
Yet another reason is the size and the ability to swap out drives and power supplies while the machine is running. Mac minis have nothing and once they die, everything that is dependent on them will die too. Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac minis cannot fit fibre channel networking equipment, which you need for connecting to RAID systems. Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
Now what about another area where people use XServes heavily, video post production houses. A lot of these have server rooms full of XServes, upon which they use XSan in conjunction with large RAID systems for networked storage and Apple's Final Cut Pro Server. They cannot put Mac Pros in their server rooms for the simple fact that there is no space. They have a mission critical requirement that their servers are up and running 24/7. You can't do that with consumer grade machines.
You may think that because your small office has a Mac-mini or Mac Pro tucked away in a corner room that that is enough for everybody.
There are thousands of companies for whom this isn't the case.
In my company's particular case, we've had a long bitter weekend where we've decided that we've had enough of Apple's lack of commitment to its professional customers.
- No more Java updates, and no commitment from anyone yet as to whether there will ever be updates. You don't know how many people use OSX to develop Java on, tens of thousands.
- No more Xserve and only two months in which to do something about it.
- Apple's hysterical public fights with major software vendors like Adobe over trivial rubbish. There are literally millions of Mac users who use Adobe's products daily and upon which they depend for their livelihoods. We have no assurance that Apple won't try to kill off Adobe's products as well. We don't think so, but we have no confidence whatsoever in Apple any more.
- Supporting Apple's clients with Windows or Linux servers for even basic things like file or directory services is not easy or in many cases even practical.
So we've decided to migrate our entire company to Windows client and server over the next few years. We're doing this with a heavy heart, but Microsoft is simply far more reliable than Apple is - They have a very good product roadmap and they have very good legacy support for products they no longer make.
And judging form the comments on the various boards where IT administrators are talking about this, we're far from the only ones who're going down this path.
Sad, sad weekend, but I think it's been coming for a long time.
How many large enterprise customers does apple have with large scale xserve deployments? Their minuscule market share shows there can't be very many. The obstacles here for any savvy administrator with a few of these servers to transition to a Mac pro server are minor annoyances with simple work arounds. The only thing you can't overcome is the loss of redundant power and if it's mission critical it should be in a two node ha config anyway at the very least.
Read my post further up. This simply isn't realistic or practical.
I was going to post an insulting post in response to your extremely vapid claims of what should be in a server room, but instead I'll post a serious answer.
Why do we need 1u servers in a server room? You claim that one Mac Pro should be enough for anybody, even companies with 200 employees.
Let's look at why a typical company and what type of company will use XServes. A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
Now, that school district/college will need to host these servers somewhere locally, because they know that some cloud service will not handle the bandwidth or the specific needs for their institution. They need the reliability of the system being there for their students and they need to be able to tailor it to their needs.
They will usually have a server room, or more often their own servers hosted in a local co-location facility. No normal data-center will allow what are essentially home and desktop machines into a server room, for a number of reasons.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
Yet another reason is the size and the ability to swap out drives and power supplies while the machine is running. Mac minis have nothing and once they die, everything that is dependent on them will die too. Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac minis cannot fit fibre channel networking equipment, which you need for connecting to RAID systems. Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
Now what about another area where people use XServes heavily, video post production houses. A lot of these have server rooms full of XServes, upon which they use XSan in conjunction with large RAID systems for networked storage and Apple's Final Cut Pro Server. They cannot put Mac Pros in their server rooms for the simple fact that there is no space. They have a mission critical requirement that their servers are up and running 24/7. You can't do that with consumer grade machines.
You may think that because your small office has a Mac-mini or Mac Pro tucked away in a corner room that that is enough for everybody.
There are thousands of companies for whom this isn't the case.
In my company's particular case, we've had a long bitter weekend where we've decided that we've had enough of Apple's lack of commitment to its professional customers.
- No more Java updates, and no commitment from anyone yet as to whether there will ever be updates. You don't know how many people use OSX to develop Java on, tens of thousands.
- No more Xserve and only two months in which to do something about it.
- Apple's hysterical public fights with major software vendors like Adobe over trivial rubbish. There are literally millions of Mac users who use Adobe's products daily and upon which they depend for their livelihoods. We have no assurance that Apple won't try to kill off Adobe's products as well. We don't think so, but we have no confidence whatsoever in Apple any more.
- Supporting Apple's clients with Windows or Linux servers for even basic things like file or directory services is not easy or in many cases even practical.
So we've decided to migrate our entire company to Windows client and server over the next few years. We're doing this with a heavy heart, but Microsoft is simply far more reliable than Apple is - They have a very good product roadmap and they have very good legacy support for products they no longer make.
And judging form the comments on the various boards where IT administrators are talking about this, we're far from the only ones who're going down this path.
Sad, sad weekend, but I think it's been coming for a long time.
I understand!
Is it possible that your company is overreacting and abandoning a working solution for an unfamiliar and costly migration to a potential solution?
Would your decision be different if Apple licenses OS X Server to, say, IBM, and uses proven integrators like Unisys? This could offer your company a better solution than you currently enjoy -- e.g. 24/7 4 hour response service.
I don't think Apple handled this very well!
As an AAPL shareholder and Apple amature-evangelist I hope Apple resolves this to your and others' satisfaction.
.
Read my post further up. This simply isn't realistic or practical.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
You can do remote lights out management with a mac pro server or mac mini server with appliances like raritan. http://www.raritan.com/products/cent...er-management/
You can monitor for hardware failures and other exceptions using snmp. http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20884?viewlocale=en_US
A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
If your serving your company's web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki, possibly netboot, user homes etc etc from one single server, redundant power is only going to save you a downtime in an extremely small percentage of hardware failure scenarios. Clustering these services or at the very least setting up some kind of multi-node high availability fail over configuration would achieve higher up time numbers in the event of hardware failure. A bad power supply doesn't have to cause a downtime if you use clustering or high availability software even without redundant power in the same server.
Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
You can buy shelves for server racks. You can rack mount two Mac Pro Servers on a shelf vertically. This will take up 12U in the rack.
http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L...erve_Guide.pdf
Mac Pros have fans which distribute heat to the back of the server. http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html#io
It's probable that you may have missed my other post on this subject. http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...&postcount=273
I was going to post an insulting post in response to your extremely vapid claims of what should be in a server room, but instead I'll post a serious answer.
Why do we need 1u servers in a server room? You claim that one Mac Pro should be enough for anybody, even companies with 200 employees.
Let's look at why a typical company and what type of company will use XServes. A school district/college that serves a number of school that almost universally use Macs, for example, will need to provide web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki and possibly netboot, user homes etc etc. The best system to use for this is OSX Server.
Now, that school district/college will need to host these servers somewhere locally, because they know that some cloud service will not handle the bandwidth or the specific needs for their institution. They need the reliability of the system being there for their students and they need to be able to tailor it to their needs.
They will usually have a server room, or more often their own servers hosted in a local co-location facility. No normal data-center will allow what are essentially home and desktop machines into a server room, for a number of reasons.
One reason is that these consumer machines do not have redundant power supplies, which means when the power supply dies, the spare automatically takes over.
Another reason is that consumer machines do not have remote management hardware built into them, in the XServe's case it's called a LOM board. This allows one to manage the machine's hardware remotely and will do things like send an email when a fan or a drive dies or restart a machine automatically and gracefully if there is a power outage, which happens very often.
You can't do that with consumer machines.
Yet another reason is the size and the ability to swap out drives and power supplies while the machine is running. Mac minis have nothing and once they die, everything that is dependent on them will die too. Mac Pros are far too large to fit into a server rack and cannot be serviced there.
Mac minis cannot fit fibre channel networking equipment, which you need for connecting to RAID systems. Mac Pros generate more heat than XServes and are not designed to channel heat to the back of the server rack like an XServe is.
Now what about another area where people use XServes heavily, video post production houses. A lot of these have server rooms full of XServes, upon which they use XSan in conjunction with large RAID systems for networked storage and Apple's Final Cut Pro Server. They cannot put Mac Pros in their server rooms for the simple fact that there is no space. They have a mission critical requirement that their servers are up and running 24/7. You can't do that with consumer grade machines.
You may think that because your small office has a Mac-mini or Mac Pro tucked away in a corner room that that is enough for everybody.
There are thousands of companies for whom this isn't the case.
In my company's particular case, we've had a long bitter weekend where we've decided that we've had enough of Apple's lack of commitment to its professional customers.
- No more Java updates, and no commitment from anyone yet as to whether there will ever be updates. You don't know how many people use OSX to develop Java on, tens of thousands.
- No more Xserve and only two months in which to do something about it.
- Apple's hysterical public fights with major software vendors like Adobe over trivial rubbish. There are literally millions of Mac users who use Adobe's products daily and upon which they depend for their livelihoods. We have no assurance that Apple won't try to kill off Adobe's products as well. We don't think so, but we have no confidence whatsoever in Apple any more.
- Supporting Apple's clients with Windows or Linux servers for even basic things like file or directory services is not easy or in many cases even practical.
So we've decided to migrate our entire company to Windows client and server over the next few years. We're doing this with a heavy heart, but Microsoft is simply far more reliable than Apple is - They have a very good product roadmap and they have very good legacy support for products they no longer make.
And judging form the comments on the various boards where IT administrators are talking about this, we're far from the only ones who're going down this path.
Sad, sad weekend, but I think it's been coming for a long time.
Basically sums up my situation with our company and many of our customers
But it seems to me that..
1) it is not commercially viable for Apple to create server hardware. It's 5% profit business and Apple has lost enthusiasm for competing in such markets.
2) Apple could irritate some people in the enterprise community by discontinuing the server hardware. The Mac Pro is a beast of a workstation but not a server product. That irritation could limit the use of Macs as client machines in Enterprise environments.
Surely the right solution is to licence Mac OS X Server to a partner hardware vendor?
This seems like a win win solution.
C.
Thanks for taking the time to post the issues your organization is encountering.
You can do remote lights out management with a mac pro server or mac mini server with appliances like raritan. http://www.raritan.com/products/cent...er-management/
You can monitor for hardware failures and other exceptions using snmp. http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20884?viewlocale=en_US
If your serving your company's web services, directory services, mail, file serving, calendaring, wiki, possibly netboot, user homes etc etc from one single server, redundant power is only going to save you a downtime in an extremely small percentage of hardware failure scenarios. Clustering these services or at the very least setting up some kind of multi-node high availability fail over configuration would achieve higher up time numbers in the event of hardware failure. A bad power supply doesn't have to cause a downtime if you use clustering or high availability software even without redundant power in the same server.
You can buy shelves for server racks. You can rack mount two Mac Pro Servers on a shelf vertically. This will take up 12U in the rack.
http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L...erve_Guide.pdf
Mac Pros have fans which distribute heat to the back of the server. http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html#io
It's probable that you may have missed my other post on this subject. http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...&postcount=273
This all true, but it still involves workarounds that we are not comfortable with. Having to use a combination of SNMP and a Raritan power management device is fine, but involves more effort and cost compared to the ease of use of a solution like Apple's LOM.
In addition to this Mac Pros simply do not fit in our racks in the number in which we need them.
In short, again, neither the Mac pro nor the Mac mini is an acceptable solution.