Colocate Your Mac mini

Pfhreak writes "Pure Static is already offering a service to colocate your Mac mini into a rack for those who want to set up a server on the cheap. Unfortunately, according to their FAQ, they're not planning on creating a Mini supercomputer. Which could be good news for those of you that are working towards being the first to set up such a cluster who have purchased a couple pallets of Minis, but haven't had time to finish setting up the cluster."

Comments

mmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

mmm, chocolate mac mini

Re:mmmm

[liangzai]

Beware of the warning on some Apple products: Do not eat.

Re:mmmm

[tverbeek]

You could hollow out one of those 20-pound Ghirardelli chocolate bars they sell at Trader Joe's for $20 with a dremel tool and put the guts of a Mac mini in there.

Not quite the same thing, but it occurs to me that the Mini would make it much easier for me to create the Mac I've been wanting to build for a few years now: an OS-X-capable "classic" Mac. I have an SE case available, and the Mini provides a trivially-easy means of fitting the necessary electronics in it. All I need now is an affordable and compatible 10" LCD, and I can finally build my Mac SE-X.

Mac Mini Cluster??

[X43B]

I've heard from several locations how desireable it would be to have a Mac Mini cluster. I hope the submitter was joking because does that make any sense? For one the maximum amount of RAM you can have is 1GB, the processor is not 64bit and gigabit ethernet is not available. I'm not saying a sub $500 Dell is the way to go. You can by an Xserve dual 2.3Ghz G5 machine for $2300. I bet one of those would outperform five Mac Minis.

Re:Mac Mini Cluster??

[X43B]

"Yeah, it may outperform, but it costs a lot more. Simple math, idoit."

1.) 1 X 2300 5*500
2.) when calling someone an "idoit", it would be best to spell it correctly

Re:Mac Mini Cluster??

[EasyT]

If you're comparing cost per unit of storage or bandwidth (and even perhaps processing power), the Xserve is going to win. But for small businesses even a single Xserve may be excessive. If you instead compare total cost out of pocket, a colocated Mac Mini suddenly looks like a superstar. The colocation service linked to is potentially a great way for a small business with limited product demand to cheaply and reliably serve the internet.

If you want to compare againt cheap PCs instead of Xserves, size will likely be your issue. From what I've seen, all PCs priced cheaper than a Mac Mini are physically larger. Any colocation service would likely charge more for the additional space consumed.

Re:Mac Mini Cluster??

[antifoidulus]

First, you are looking at the wrong stats. If you plan to run your cluster as anything besides a side show, heat/power concerns are going to be as big of factor in your cost calculations as the hardware itself. I don't know if the mac mini gives off a lot of heat but it's something to take into consideration.
However, the fact that you probably cannot upgrade the ethernet capabilities in a mac mini to even fast ethernet is probably the bigger strike against the mac mini. In a lot of problems that employ parallel computing, the network latency can be as important as the processor speed(of course, there are plenty of exceptions and plent of "trivially parallel" problems). The Dell is a bit more upgradable than the mac mini. Though it's not nearly as cute.

Re:Mac Mini Cluster??

[cheezedawg]

1.) 1 X 2300 5*500

Actually, as other people have pointed out, you can get them for $450.

Re:Mac Mini Cluster??

[Lars T.]

For some things you don't <i>need</I>memory bandwidth - including RC5-72. And the Opteron, sorry, sucks ass at it. <a href="http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/">See for yourself</A>.

Processor, MHz, #, Score (in keys/sec)
AMD Opteron 2420 1 9,547,969.00
AMD Opteron 1600 4 24,101,848.00
AMD Opteron 1792 2 9,891,998.00
AMD Opteron 2000 2 15,145,274.67
AMD Opteron 2200 2 15,099,050.00
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1250 1 13,123,240.83
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1333 1 13,918,160.25
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1400 1 14,769,045.00
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1416 1 15,045,897.00
PowerPC 970 G5 1600 1 8,360,235.00
PowerPC 970 G5 1800 1 13,147,178.00
PowerPC 970 G5 2000 1 15,057,412.00
PowerPC 970 G5 2000 2 28,715,624.55
PowerPC 970 G5 2400 2 31,000,000.00
PowerPC 970 G5 2500 2 33,962,933.71

I can't resist....

[fm6]

...giving a blurb for my former employer Hurricane Electric, even though I despise the idiot who owns the place. They'll rent you cabinet space that is probably not much more expensive than a MacMini "condo". And they provide 24/7 human intervention for free, something MacMiniColo charges extra for.

Also, I'd wonder about any colo facility located in a former bank vault. It sounds cool, but it doesn't strike me as a very cost-effective place to put a data center.

Re:I can't resist....

[Yaztromo]

Also, I'd wonder about any colo facility located in a former bank vault. It sounds cool, but it doesn't strike me as a very cost-effective place to put a data center.

It would also be a complete bitch to run cables into it.

Some years ago I worked for an ISP that had taken over part of an old medical office building that had been renovated (somewhat). There was this one great room with an opening in one inner wall where there used to be a window which we used as the server room.

Everything was great until the day when the VP of Technology decided we should run some cable through the wall, and took a screwdriver and tried to hammer it through the wall. Clang -- he hit solid metal, and couldn't get through. As it turned out, the room used to be an X-ray chamber, and had 1/4" of lead from floor to ceiling in each and every wall.

On the bright side, it was nice to know our server room would have probably survived a distant nuclear blast ;).

Yaz.

Why?

[NardofDoom]

The Mac OS is 90% of the experience of owning a Mac, and having the hardware is the other 10%. And what's the point of having a server that's also pushing a GUI?

Colocate a Linux server, which is almost made to be administered remotely. Macs are made to be seen, used, and not heard. Unless you're running Garageband or iTunes.

Re:Why?

[moosesocks]

OS X is essentially FreeBSD with a pretty GUI on top.

Install OS X server, and you've got a top-notch backend with a beautiful / easy to use graphical frontend that you can either access via VNC or apple's remote server administration utility (not a remote desktop, but rather, a remote control panel). People use Windows 2003 because it provides a decent feature-set while being easy to use. Linux is obviously more featured and secure, but is a PITA to use. OS X Server takes the best of both worlds.

When the system's just sitting there, the GUI isn't using many resources -- RAM would be the only concern I see here, and chances are that most of the GUI stuff would be the first to be swapped to disk.

My biggest peeves here are the Mini's hardware specs. 256mb of ram just won't cut it for a server, and no sane person would run a server without RAID or some other form of redundant backup. Of course, you could set up two minis in a load-balancing configuration, and then you've got much more redundancy than you would get with one server running RAID.

Can you really trust a company...

[tdemark]

...who has the following in their welcome Flash movie?

The site is overloaded.
you loose paying customers.

Emphasis is mine. Lack of capitalization and bad spelling is theirs.

You'd have to be pretty desperate

[Cmdr-Absurd]

The mini is NOT server-grade hardware.
from the FAQ

What about hardware failure? In case of hardware failure we will repair the units. However they are your units and you will be charged for the repairs.

How often will that happen if they put a bunch of these in a rack togeter? laptop drive running 24/7.... hmmm. In an encloded space jammed up against other minis.... hmmm. seems like a bad idea to me. Better to get a used xserve.

Re:You'd have to be pretty desperate

[TheRaven64]

I just got an email from the company addressing these two concerns. Firstly, they are in a wire grid maximising air flow around them - which should alleviate the cooling issue. Secondly, they allow external disk drives to be connected for $5/month or $7.50/month if you require a power outlet. Since OS X can boot from a FireWire disk, there is nothing at all stopping you from buying a 320GB 7,200RPM disk and leaving the internal disk turned off.

run away!

[bill_mcgonigle]

...giving a blurb for my former employer Hurricane Electric

I used to use these guys in the '90s. They screwed up the billing, claimed my CC# was giving an 'error code' (it wasn't, it was fine for everthing else) and instead of doing something like, say, calling me on the phone, they deleted all my files and canceled my account without notice.

Buyer beware.

Re:run away!

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm currently using 1&1 and so far, so good.

If you get the root server account ($50/mo) you have your own machine so you could install FreeBSD or whatever you want on it. The rescue disc image is debian linux though, so you'd have to be conversant with that for dealing with a crashed filesystem (and sure that the resuce disc has the appropriate filesystem modules on it for your FreeBSD partitions).

Really though, if you're just interested in a shell account there's not a heck of a lot of difference between a FreeBSD and a Linux shell account (and we're happy about it!).

Re:Running OSX without GUI

[Puggs]

yes

login as '>console' as the user

i may have the details slightly wrong, but ive been up for 30hrs, so please forgive me for not checking.......

you know..

[outZider]

This is a blatant advertisement.

My take on Mini-as-server...

[Bug-Y2K]

Speaking as the guy who runs the oldest and largest Macintosh colocation facility on the Internet. (outing myself on /.)

I think, the form-factor is great. However, that said they would make a lousy server. It has a very slow, laptop HDD not at all optimized for use 7/24. They are not equipped with an adequate fan for cooling the unit if packed densely (like the photoshoped up "condo" on the Pure Static website.) If packed that tight, I bet the MBTF of the drive (and other components) drops to under two months or something insanely short like that.

Google "IBM Deskstar drive failure" to find out when non-server spec drives are used in a 7/24/365 environment

The final remaining issue with the mini-as-server idea is the external power brick. Wall-warts are the bane of any server installation. Very tough to work around. Potential fire hazard if not handled properly.

...

All that said, I expect we will see some clients who send us Minis to colo. We will probably treat them like we did iMacs & G4 Cubes - Put them on well ventilated shelves, in open racks. NOT pack them tight in a cabinet.

And with the Mini, just like the companies that popped up claiming to be "the place" to colo your [G4, Cube, Xserve, insert Apple product here] in the end, digital.forest will still have more of them colocated. Why? We have been doing it longer, have a better facility, and better support. We have knowledgeable systems administrators ON SITE 7/24, who understand MacOS, MacOS X, as well as other UNIX flavors and Win32. We are in our 11th year, opening our third facility. We are a known quantity, with a reputation for quality. Not just some guy who registered a domain name on January 12th.

However... all this interest in using them as servers should be a big honkin' clue to Apple!
They need to make "Xserve Lite" 1U - 18" X 18" X 1.75"
one or two drives
one 64-bit pci slot (for an FC card)
1 usb port front and one in back
ditto firewire
built-in video
(low-end admins need video... lame I know, but check the lists and forums about how many people freak when their G5 Xserve arrives sans video card)
Ideal would be video front and back, ala the Dell servers
No need for the goofy split case of the Xserve (I have seen two fall apart in a rack)
No need for those gawd-awful "whack a paddle/kill the server" drive sleds. (I want to find the engineer in Cupertino who designed this and beat them senseless - with one of these lame drive sleds! Sure, they look nice, but they are functionally worthless. Except perhaps as a blunt object to beat people with.)
$1000 price point.
"workgroup server" or "lightweight web server"
No need even for OS X Server, just MacOS
An option to buy Server if you need filesharing for more than X users.
If there really is a market for people to shoehorn an low-end DESKTOP machine into a server role... then Apple should address it. Especially something as ill-suited to server work as the Mac Mini.

--chuck goolsbee
vp tech ops
digital.forest
seattle, wa

Re:My take on Mini-as-server...

[harlows_monkeys]

I think, the form-factor is great. However, that said they would make a lousy server. It has a very slow, laptop HDD not at all optimized for use 7/24

What about servers with light load? The thing that is very interesting about this Mac Mini colocation deal is that the monthly cost is comparable to shared hosting plans. Sure, you wouldn't want to stick 300 virtual hosts on a Mac Mini...but how about taking one site from a virtual host and putting it on a dedicated Mini? That looks quite attractive for those of us who would like more control than we get on shared hosting, but don't have high load sites.

Re:My take on Mini-as-server...

[harlows_monkeys]

You forgot the 10/100 NIC

What about it? Most colocation plans are 100 mbit/second or under (usually well under).

Re:My take on Mini-as-server...

[ArbitraryConstant]

Apple doesn't tend to use very good network chipsets in their low end desktop machines. They eat a lot of CPU time and don't go very fast. Doesn't matter in a desktop machine, but it hurts in a server, even at slow colo speeds.

Probably doesn't hurt as much as the laptop drive anyway. Besides, people probably don't want these as high-load servers. The probably just want something off-site.

Heat dissipation

[babbage]

I was looking at this site the other day. My first impression was that it was a pretty good idea -- you have this cheap little computer that would be more than adequate for running a website &/or mail server, and it's small enough that you could get dozens of them of a single rack.

Then it dawned on me that the Mac Mini doesn't have a fan, and depends entirely on being able to vent heat around the bottom edges and back panel. Apple's site has a document warning users:

Always place your Mac mini on a hard, flat surface to provide maximum airflow to the computer's vents around the rubber base. Don't put anything on top of your Mac mini or stack Mac minis on top of each other either.

Sounds like a dense rack full of the things would be liable to overheat & burn out.

Are these people thinking about cooling issues? Their FAQ page made no mention of it last week, and it looks like it still doesn't now. Would anyone trust a rack full of these things not to cook the circuitry?

Poor Cluster

[vijayiyer]

Real clusters use high speed networking like InfiniBand or Myrinet to reduce latency to tolerable levels. Anything else is just a bunch of computers hooked together for trivially parallelizable problems. Seeing as how there aren't expansion slots in the Mac Mini, I really don't see the point.

Isn't that illegal in Minnesota?

[Skippy_kangaroo]

When I read the headline it looked like "Colectomy your Mac Mini"

That sound's painful and I'm sure it would be against the reverse engineering clauses in your license agreement.

Tish, boom - I'll be here all week.

Re:Running OSX without GUI

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Apple publishes a very nice cli reference manual

You don't have a link, by any chance?

Command-Line Administration

More docs

Well...

[bjjohnson]

I guess my question is... Is this a case of someone taking advantage of someone else's ignorance? Or could this actually be a legit service. One USEFUL idea is that a person could want a remote location for remote access from around the world to a Mac fromt end via remote desktop services. Someone there to reboot the thing if it crashes while you are in Singapore. I guess there are some good uses for this. Just a thought... What do YOU think?

Interesting but economic?

[jago25_98]

The mini mac has some nice features , especially media related. But these would surely be wasted - like the graphics card.

Surely there's a better option than this?; even powerPC based and similar price range? I'm suprised a slashdotter hasn't said this yet.

Re:Interesting but economic?

[ArbitraryConstant]

The thing with a jail is that it'll be running on a very high end machine (unfortunately FreeBSD doesn't have a decent PowerPC port yet, otherwise an Xserve would be ideal for this) (also unfortunately, MacOS doesn't seem to have the jail facility, so you can't do the jails with MacOS would would also be ideal), and it's probably set up to failover onto another machine if it goes down. You're paying for the reliability.

If your Mac mini goes down, you could be SOL for weeks.

The value you place on reliability is of course completely up to you.

Mac OS X is n FreeBSD

[@madeus]

OS X is essentially FreeBSD with a pretty GUI on top.

Mac OS X is based on Rhapsody (with a new Window Manager theme and the core display technology being display PDF rather than being display PostScript), which is based on OPENSTEP, which is based on NeXTSTEP which is based on mach and UNIX from Berkeley.

There are BITS of FreeBSD in Mac OS X, but there also BITS of FreeBSD in multiple releases of Windows.

Like FreeBSD, it's a UNIX implimentation, but it's a very different style of UNIX implimentation from FreeBSD and it's not based on FreeBSD.

FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW, you can just choose to not start it. I'm tempted to say your better off with Debian on a lower end G4 PowerPC system like the mini though.