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.

Comments

Bold claim...

[sean_nestor]

"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."

...call me skeptical on that one.

Re:Bold claim...

[palegray.net]

Apple's actually pretty good at this, although it can lead to the same sorts of problems many businesses face with regard to Windows-based server solutions. The easier something is for "anybody" to set up, the less likely an organization will be to keep a good admin around. So when stuff blows up, they can find themselves scrambling for someone to fix problems.

Re:Bold claim...

[sean_nestor]

That's precisely how many consulting companies make their daily bread. Hell, nothing wrong with that. But you have to admit, it seems a bit misleading to claim that something like a server can be setup "without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing."

That is a recipe for disaster waiting to happen. I've been in the unfortunate spot of representing a consulting company called in to configure a Mac OSX Server purchased by less-than-knowledgeable employees. It was a small business, about 5-10 people, that did contract-based graphic design/marketing. They loved Apple stuff, and were suckered into a completely unnecessary Xserve system, complete with overpriced external rack-mount tape backup drive. Being young and mildly tech-conscious, they overestimated their ability to manage this thing, doubtlessly egged on by some "whiz" at a Genius Bar waxing their balls about how well they'd be able to run it on their own.

Wrong. Granted, it's not hard to someone like me who does this sort of thing for a living, but managing backups was way out of their league. The backups weren't even running, though they remained blissfully unaware of this fact, and setting up network shares/user permissions was beyond their capability. This ended up costing them way more than ever needed to spend to get what amounted to a file server up and running, and I blame this on bad marketing.

Oh, we tried to convince them to sell their ridiculously overpowered server equipment before it depreciated in value, but they were insistent on using it, because it's Apple.

Misleading marketing like this is exactly what drives the borderline masochistic relationship Apple nuts have with Apple. All I can do is shake my head.

Re:Bold claim...

[element-o.p.]

Being young and mildly tech-conscious, they overestimated their ability to manage this thing...

C'mon, who here on /. hasn't been there? If you haven't yet found yourself in such a position, you will eventually.

...but managing backups was way out of their league. The backups weren't even running, though they remained blissfully unaware of this fact...

This reminded me of my own worst IT disaster, back when I was young, green and waaaaaay over-confident. I learned from my mistake; who's to say that your clients didn't learn also? They at least had the common sense to recognize that they didn't know enough and therefore called you, right?

It seems to me that you are making an error that is all too common: ignorance != stupidity. There is no shame in simply being unaware of something -- everyone has something yet to learn. The truly stupid, however...well, they have a way of weeding themselves out of the gene pool.

As for the "borderline masochistic relationship between [Apple users] and Apple" -- I don't know about that. I've only used a Mac occasionally, but it seems like a far less masochistic relationship than that which exists between Windows users and Microsoft, or even arguably less masochistic than the relationship between Linux users and <insert name of favorite distro here> (and I say that as one who regularly uses Gentoo, so I'm neck-deep in masochism <grin>).

Re:Scoff?

[samkass]

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.

Compared it to the Cobalt Qube..

[jcr]

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

Re:For those who need a server...

[fermion]

I don't know where you have been for the past ten years, but the time of putting beige boxes in the back rooms and praying hat they don' break down is over with. Servers are now serious business, and the aesthetics matter because it is often related to reliability, TCO, and overhead. Servers now require real-estate, which costs money, power, which costs money, and cooling, which costs money. What is more, downtime costs money. On a personal note, the server room I use follows the philosophy of 'who cares about aesthetics'. It is impossible to work, takes forever to get things fixed, and generally is pain. I can imagine how much nicer it would be just to have neat stacks of mac minis.

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

Re:I can see plenty of uses for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I can see plenty of uses for it.

[anagama]

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.

Re:I can see plenty of uses for it.

[Jeremi]

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)