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!