Kai Staats of Terra Soft Chats About Rackable Macs

iMacRobert writes "Mac Help Radio, Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, will be talking live with Kai Staats, co-founder and CEO of Terra Soft Solutions, who will be talking about his company's new 2U Macs, the power of the PowerPC, and Yellow Dog Linux. Following Kai will be Anita Holmgren from Tenon Intersystems on Post.Office and iTools 6.5 for Mac OS X, which make running web-based services easier for the average webmaster."

Comments

Re:Should be interesting to listen to

[raytoler]

I can attest to the need for less expensive rack-form Macintoshes. My day-job employer decided to pass on creating a massive Mac-based Linux cluster (1000+ machines), despite having one of the best cost to power ratios among all systems tested. One of the primary reasons was the form factor. We could cram way more processors into a rack using small ATX, (and later 1u black boxes) than with the beautiful but rack-hostile tupper-mac form factor. (We even toyed with building a wall of cubes, but they were just way too expensive!)

I can think of three major areas that cry out for an inexpensive rack-mac solution right off the bat:

Biotechnology/Bioinformatics
Bio-scientists have a long history with the Mac, but it's getting squeezed out in many companies because of management's perceived cost-benefit of PC boxes. As we start needing to process larger and larger amounts of genetic information, the need for a small form-factor mac increases.

Graphics/Video Production
Rack-Macs are needed in this industry, especially when using a render farm for 3d graphics!

Music Production / Performance
Anyone using a Mac to run a keyboard rig or show has long wanted a Rack Mac. Powerbooks are now powerful enough to do much of what is needed, but I'd love to have a 1 or 2 space Mac that didn't suffer CD/DVD speed problems from being mounted sideways. I'd also love to be able to put the Mac in the studio machine room rack and not lose use of the CD/DVD.

These are just a few examples, and yes, workarounds exist, but an out-of-the-box rack Mac solution (that didn't cost a premium) would be a great improvement!

Low Profile Mac OSX Server in the works

[TwitchCHNO]

Apple Relizes that this is a share of the market place that it is missing - and I believe Apple is making it there - slowly.

3D - Market: Maya ported to Mac OS X
and with Pixar's Render Man already available for Linux I do not believe that Darwin will be far behind.
RenderMan
With the combination of Maya - Render Man - & Clusterable Darwin/ OS X machines (especially if thier low profile this puts Mac at the fore front of 3D rendering. I'm sure that Steve Jobs recognizes the demand for a setup such as this - as he is the CEO of PIXAR.

For the scientific field Apple has released Genentech BLAST and there a slew of other programs being ported from unix to OSX.

After observing Steve Jobs fro many years - you must realize that Jobs will not release a product until it is the most svelte & elegant thing in the market place.

When Apple does release low profile - Rack CPU's they will be *insane*. IT organizations & Science reasearch labs will drool all overthemselves.

But Jobs does not work on a normal time table:
Recognize market - develop product for market - release.

Jobs works more like this:
Recognize market.
Target specific areas in Market where the Mac can dominate, Think about that for several years.
Add ram & 50Mhz increase to iMac line.
Release software developing lust & desire for product line.
Begin engineering new product.
Take a nap.
Add ram & 50Mhz increase to iMac line
Scrap new product start over - with same deadline.
Release new product at Apple Dev WORLD Expo with the famous line "Oh, & one more thing...."