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Apple Blurs the Server Line With Mac Mini Server
Toe, The writes "Today Apple announced several new hardware offerings, including a new Mac mini, their (almost-literally) pint-sized desktop computer. In a bizarre twist, they are now also offering a Mac mini with Mac OS X Server bundled in, along with a two hard drives somehow stuffed into the tiny package. Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a 'server.' However, with the robust capabilities of Snow Leopard Server (a true, if highly GUI-fied, UNIX server), it seems likely to find a niche in small businesses and even enthusiasts' homes. The almost completely guided setup process means that people can set up relatively sophisticated services without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing. What the results will be in terms of security, etc. will be... interesting to watch as they develop." El Reg has a good roundup article of the many announcements; the multi-touch Magic Mouse is right up there on the techno-lust-inspiration scale.
...call me skeptical on that one.
I rather like the really small form factor. Given that it comes with OS X Server (which costs $499 by itself), I think it's a pretty decent deal for those who want an OS X Server machine for a small office.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Meh. Some of us already use boxes like this (or actual minis) in this sort of capacity.
Once you install a robust OS on a bit of hardware, the whole desktop/server distinction is entirely arbitrary.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I rather like the really small form factor. Given that it comes with OS X Server (which costs $499 by itself), I think it's a pretty decent deal for those who want an OS X Server machine for a small office.
Me too. I don't see this becoming hugely popular as any business with a large IT department can just throw together a small server if that is what they need but I can see that this mini server hits the sweet spot for a fair number of small businesses.
"Servers" generally have things that make it robust and easier maintain
and easier to put into a rack in a colo somewhere. This includes things
like hot swap drive bays, hardware RAID and multiple power supplies.
This is the sort of thing that separates a Dell "server" or a Sun "server"
from desktop machines.
I can take a clone crapbox and do the same thing with it (and have).
I can take a regular mini and load a server OS on it (and have).
If Apple didn't overprice their Server Distribution to begin with,
there would be really little point to this particular configuration.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Back in the day, any random PC could be a competent cvs/build server for a small development team.
I knew a guy that had a Linux box doing this job long enough without trouble that he forgot how he had set it up.
Smaller PCs are legion. Even cheap mini-sized systems are abundant now.
Once you contemplate all the other possibilities, and consider that you
may not need something terribly pretty, this thing isn't really that
exciting.
Apple should just drop the cliff pricing on the Server version of MacOS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Seriously, this thing could be a nice little Subversion/backup/collaboration server for a small iPhone development shop. With built-in CalDAV, email, wiki, svn, time machine, rsync, web server, etc., it's a nice little small workgroup server. It would be nice if they could have made it cost a little less, but having a small, quiet server in a home or small office is pretty valuable.
E pluribus unum
Apple already has a rank-mounted server called the Xserve for this purpose.
For the price of one Xserve you could get 3 Mini's loaded with 10.6 Server. So if you don't need a beefcake Xeon, why not?
The Mac Mini Server goes for a grand, with four gigs of RAM, and 1TB of disk, Core 2 Duo processor at 2.53Ghz.
The Cobalt Qube 3 sold for $1149 in 2002 (inflation adjusted, that's about $1367 today), with a 450 Mhz MIPS CPU, 40 gigs of disk, and 32 megs of RAM.
Looks like Apple's going to pick up a lot of business in the niche that Sun abandoned.
-jcr
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I think that is the issue. What if one wants a server and all one has is a telephone closet. For 1K you can put a mini in there and probably won't need to worry about power, cooling, whatever. A thousand for a server. Back in the olden days, when I was putting the first servers in a MS Windows environment, the machines cost at lest twice that much, and were unreliable. Today, a growing business could probably live for a while just adding more servers. And at that price, one could keep an extra around. You now, a redundant array of mac minis.
I am not saying that I can imagine a real case where a mini server would make sense. I am just saying that discounting things like aesthetics and design in a what is clearly meant to be SOHO server is rather silly. Not everyone has the funds to hire an MSCE to run a server, has the need for a rack solution, or the ability to set up a *nix server from scratch. In reality, I can't imagine how this would be better than outsourcing, but I can appreciate how this is one of Apples cleaver ideas. I suspect MS might be pushing their xbox server next month
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If you're going to put Debian or Ubuntu on it, you might as well get an Asus Eee Box and save yourself several hundred bucks. For light server roles, the Atom CPU is fine. Works for me!
Am I the only one that thinks that the pricing for the Mac Mini has gone a little insane? When they first came out they were for people who wanted to dip their toes into the Apple world but without spending a small fortune. Now the base unit is £500, hardly a drop in the ocean.
And yet again, nothing headless in the mid-range :( I can either go for the sexy (but hugely overpriced and underspecced) £649 Mac Mini or jump over £1200 to the £1,899 quad core beast. As the idea of paying to replace your monitor every time Apple make your old product obsolete sounds a little absurd to me - I'm not interested in the iMacs.
It's no wonder that some companies (*cough*psystar*cough*) and people are flirting with the idea of a Hackintosh. A £800 mid-range headless box from Apple would surely hit the sweet spot for quite a lot of people.
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This is interesting for people considering a DC-powered server room. The Mini uses 18.5V DC with an external AC-DC converter. No hardware modifications required to run off a DC supply.
Why does nobody think of the cooling? It doesn't matter how small the boxes are, if you cram too many of them into one room without adequate cooling, you're in for a world of hurt. A bigger, faster machine is often more economically sound than a smaller one like this, unless you have a dedicated, seriously cooled server room, and in that case, the non-server form factor would be more of a pain in the ass than the space savings would win you, IMHO.
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So Honda announced a bunch of new Accords.
Cool.
I was looking at buying a Kia for $10k. Can I buy one of those new Accords for that price? I don't see any listed here or on honda.com.
Did I not say "small size and quiet operation"? Since when did "any random PC" fulfill those requirements?
Did I say otherwise? I said there are primary reasons other than aesthetics to use a Mac Mini. For iPhone development in particular, which requires MacOS X, the other systems are not necessarily suitable. If you have different needs and different solutions, that's wonderful too, but quite irrelevant to my point.
Who said anything about "exciting"? This is just a server in a small box.
My point was simply to reject that choosing the Mac Mini must primarily be for aesthetics, I'm not sure what yours is.
Depends on your requirements, afaict the eeebox only supports a single internal hard drive (and I don't think it has esata or firewire either so you are left with shitty USB if you want a second drive for raid). This new server mini supports two hard drives (the previous gen mini could also be hacked to support this but it's nice that apple have made it official). The mini also has a much better processor (which you say is not important to you, fair enough doesn't mean it isn't important to anyone)
In terms of bang per cubic centimeter the mac mini is pretty hard to beat.
As always there are trade-offs, the eeebox is small and cheap but not powerful. The mini is small and reasonably powerful but not particularly cheap. A bottom of the range dell vostro has a price comparable to the eeebox and specs comparable to the base model mini but isn't small.
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Don't forget shared calendaring. I'm currently running Apple's Darwin Calendar Server (DCS) on a Debian Lenny box for my office, but it probably uses 7x the electricity the mini does. It takes a bit of fiddling to work with the DCS which many people may not really have either the time or capacity to deal with, and OS X Server would make the backend configuration pretty painless. What is wild is that yesterday, OS X Server unlimited license was $999. Today it comes with a computer for the same price.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Oh you mean you just let it sit on your desk as a shiny ornament?
I may be ignorant, but my suspicion is that there are a lot of servers out there that spend 99% of their day idling, waiting for an HTTP request to come in. They are left running 24/7 because you never know when somebody will want to access the data they hold, but nevertheless they are almost always idle.
For that kind of light-duty service, the idle wattage is significant. (of course an even better solution would be to merge a bunch of those services onto a single physical machine, but that's not always done because it can be complex and/or risky to do)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.