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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.
Especially if you have other Macs in your office, you can leave OS X on it and have a nice little small office server. You could also throw Debian or Ubuntu on it and use it as you see fit.
The small form factor would make it easy for a developer to keep one on the (literal) desktop alongside a workstation. Personally, I'd use virtualization instead, but others may prefer having a physical box to play with.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I put OS 10.4-Server (10-Client version) on a Mac Mini back in 2006 and continued to pick up used mac minis for less than $200 each to play around with Xgrid. Eventually I moved the server over to an old dual core PowerMac G4 tower and used all the Mac Minis as render nodes, but it was a fun little project and worked extremely well for rendering blender, compressor, and Final Cut projects. I even put screamernet II on them for lightwave rendering as well. I had about $4500 invested in the project, the price of a decent Macpro, and had a distributed rendering grid.
With the release of some tools like Xgrid Lite, there wasn't the need to go with the full blown Server version of OSX in OS 10.5 or 10.6. Everything I needed could be downloaded with the xserve remote admin kit and a default install of OSX.
But for the year or more I used the Mac Mini as a home server, it worked extremely well. It just sat on the bookshelf and frankly I just ignored it 90% of the time because it did exactly what it needed. I'd log in every month or so to do updates, etc. But it was pretty much turn on and forget. Plus it didn't suck down as much power as the PowerMac. Something I learned once I moved out of an apartment with the utilities included and into my house.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Yeah, or universities and such in need of a budget supercomputer. You can easily create a cluster of these things by using Xgrid and because of the small form factor, you won't have to reserve an entire room for this setup.
Or if you do have a room to spare, you can cram insane amounts of gigahertzes and terabytes in there for relatively little money.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
For small business purposes, Microsoft server offerings are horrid. Windows Server OEM price! is $800, and then there is the whole "client access liscence" crap where until you pay even more if you want more than 5 computers to talk to your server!
This, on the other hand, is a complete system for $1000, thats silent (so you can have it in your office, suprisingly important!), doesn't have client access liscence crap, and can support a bunch of windows systems as well as macs for file sharing, email, calendaring if you want to use Mozilla rather than Outlook, etc etc etc.... Don't have enough storage for your liking? Simply add a 4 TB external USB array for $800...
Its a really brutal product to deal with if you are Microsoft.
Test your net with Netalyzr
But Jobs put two buttons on the NeXT mouse!
Apple's been using the UNIX trademark in relation to Snow Leopard for quite a while. Either 10.6 is certified (as Apple's website seems to imply), or The Open Group is in danger of losing their trademark.
New imacs make the mac pro look even more over priced pay $1000 more to get smaller HD, much weak video, and less ram. Also why still 9400m in the $1200 imac? and the base mini should have bigger then a 160g and better video then 9400m at $600 and $800. The imcas just keep getting bigger and bigger how about people who don't have room 20inch+ systems to get new hardware.
also only dual cores in $1200, $1500, $1700 imacs?
Excellent point - iPhoto is one area where Apple seems to continue to miss the boat. It is very slow for what it does, and sharing photos (which it already does do from the client) takes forever over gigabit networks. Backup is theoretically easy ("just copy the iphoto library from one computer to another!) but in the real world is a mess (not at all automated, and when you take two different computers to different photo shoots, for example, you wind up with different libraries and synchronizing them is not as easy). It's quite frustrating to have your slideshow up on a projector and then think, oh, those photos are on a different computer...
I have to say I have the same problem with iTunes. Lots of great potential there but the actual sharing software is way too slow to be useful with large libraries, and there is no easy way to maintain one master music collection on a hard drive being served to different computers. Instead you wind up with several different libraries across different boxes, each incomplete in a different way. It would be great to see Apple integrate server technology into these tools for home entertainment centers and other home server applications.
I've already put my order in for two if them. We need a test machine to deploy our upgrade to Snow Leopard Server (on an xserve), and this is the perfect candidate. I may also use them as hot swappable backup servers if they will boot the server images we have. In the past we have not done this due to expense. I had a PPC xserve die a few years ago due to a big surge at our data center and was able to recover using an old imac for a few weeks while we sorted out the mess. Transparent to our users except in performance, but mostly unnoticed. To have a hot swappable server that can be powered on with the touch of a button if something in your main server fails is awesome. Also this allows us to safely tweak our sites and services in a test environment that was cost prohibitive before. The ability to set up and deploy directory services, a web site, etc. for under 1k is pretty damn cool.
Well, the original poster said "cramp LOADS of those things in a small space", which I would interpret to be more than 8 at least. Plus, the price doesn't account for the numerous nice things blades get you over a shelf full of minis, like a backplane instead of individual cables all over, organization, remote console, more efficient energy use, hot swap stuff...
We use a first generation Mac Mini in my office to do nightly builds of both our MacOS and Windows software. The windows builds run on VM Ware. Its not uncommon for the build machine to be running 100% CPU for hours at a time. It hasn't been rebooted in months. We've been doing this with the same machine for over three years. Its wonderful. Never had a problem...
I might agree with you if it ran off 48V, but 18.5V? WTF is that?
Plus I'd assume that it needs close to bang on 18.5V, whereas 48V enterprise stuff is good within ±25%, generally...
Not that I see central offices lining up to get mac minis anyways.
Sent from my PDP-11
Apple did not do this because they are trying to gain new customers. They did it because existing Apple customers already have been doing this for a long time.
Putting OSX Server onto little Mac Minis has been going on for a long time. People strap them to the back of plasma TVs, use them in point-of-sale, put them in kiosk boxes that use a modem for remote administration, or use them for a test server on their desk. Let's face it, I don't want to put a rack mount 1U XServe on my desk when I could just use a Mac Mini and basically get the same software features on much MUCH cheaper hardware.
That is why people want OSX Server on the Mac Mini; dev/testing, kiosks, and other rough-environment deployments.
At my work this would be just ideal. We are a medium sized electrical contracting company(I am an electrician, not an IT person and we don't have one on staff, but there is a company on retainer should anything go wrong) with about 65 people on the payroll. At our office/warehouse we have one server that sits in a mess of wires and a variety of workstations. All our computers are aging Win XP machines which are clunky, occupy space and electrically inefficient. The server handles email, file serving, backups and maybe the website...I don't know if we host it ourselves or have it hosted elsewhere. In a year or two we are going to be due for an upgrade and due to as the level of dissatisfaction with Simply Accounting increases I feel tempted to suggest switching our office entirely to Macs running MoneyWorks Gold. We would retain one Windows computer to run our estimating and bidding software, Accubid and BidWinner Plus.
This mini server would complete the picture and do it without requiring a server closet...which is good because we don't have the room for one. We don't need or want massive processing power...we want compactness, reliability and energy efficiency. Our server is mounted on the wall of a warehouse room where we store large quantities of wiring, tools and other supplies, and as we are short on space this would be very welcome. I imagine the reduced frustration would increase our productivity and make management a lot easier without needing to call up the IT company all the time. We install a lot of renewable energy equipment so energy consciousness in our own office is something we pay attention to. People who scoff at this thing simply don't work with or see applications where this would be a perfect drop-in solution. Apple is once again offering something that nobody else is capable of and I am glad they have paid attention to something a lot of people need but cannot otherwise find. At my company Linux is not even remotely an option, so fanboys can go pound sand.
I host my website on a mac mini, and in fact manage a few mac minis as dedicated servers. They make pretty good machines for web hosting, due to low power consumption, and the fact you can fit about 8 in 3U of rackspace/
Photo:
http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/File:Macmini-rack.jpg
Not running OSX mind, but Debian. More info on http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/ExoticA:Hosting
Yes, it's a slick strategy. You're right: Apple doesn't compete in the commodity PC space.
But why are you picking on your art department?
You say that people buy Macs because they are "chic, cool, and exclusive -- a luxury item", as if your fellow employees wanted them just to boost their egos. To say that, you need to deliberately ignore a very important fact, and what is probably the real reason your art department wants Mac hardware: Mac hardware runs OS X, and runs it well.
Why not give your artists the benefit of the doubt?