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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.
...call me skeptical on that one.
that focuses primarily on the visual aesthetics of the physical box that it's housed in.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Why scoff at a nice looking server that adds to the array of options you have for serving whatever you may want to serve? Sure, it may not be the right thing to rack-mount en mass (though maybe it would work fine for that too), but it'd be a safe bet to say that Apple isn't trying to take over the rack-mounted server market with this particular offering. Those who would scoff would merely be scoffing at a misuse of the product.
That's not a knife.. THIS is a knife (pulling out Kabar-based server)
Go and check out how much a so called 'windows home server' cost and is like on the market, what's the argument here? Mac mini server is a brilliant idea, and it is what a lot of mac mini users is doing with it.
I love the idea of a Mac Mini server for many tasks. If you just need a server for directory, file, and print stuff, this is a damn good idea, especially if you're constrained for space. Even if you're not, most small offices don't have huge IT setups... many just use a business-grade cable or DSL connection with a small router. This is the perfect kind of server for that kind of small office setup. I don't think Apple anticipates anyone running heavy SQL on this or anything. This is also a good way to test the waters to see how much of a market there really is for OSX Server. Bravo to Apple on this one. It's a few more bucks than a PC equivalent (no surprise there), but a typically elegant-while-useful idea that Apple is sometimes famous for.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
That's not a knife, that's a spoon.
"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.
Actually, I have heard some great things about OSX server. You do realize at the core its just BSD, which makes some great servers. And if your going to have a GUI, why not the OSX gui rather than xwindows.
I compare OSX server to Windows Server, a bunch of crap running on top of a decent network operating system. If I had to choose between the two, I'd probably choose OSX if my environment needed a single file server for a mixed OS network.
For a small workgroup, it has a lot to offer for centralization and system management, similar to having windows machines in an AD environment. See http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Ah, I see you've played "knifey-spooney" before...
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
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.
Imagine a small home/workgroup server like this, but with iPhoto support so that everyone can share a photo database.
OSX server includes an iCalendar server, Address Book server, Mail Server, iChat server... so they have every other server component that a Mac Centric office would need, why no iPhoto server?
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Wait, Apple overprices their server distro? The cheapest version of Windows Server that I could find was 2003 R2 Standard, which is $1000 for five seats. OS X Server is $500 for unlimited seats.
Of course compared to a Free Unix/Linux box both are overpriced, but if spending five hundred bucks saves your sysadmin a couple of hours tinkering around (it may or may not - I have very little experience with OS X Server and no experience as a sysadmin), it's paid for itself.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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
Yup, I'd agree with you. I consider myself a Linux guy, but I have a Mac Mini at home. I originally bought it so I could push stuff I purchased from iTunes to my iPod (and I still use it for that.) I have it plugged into my TV via VGA, and use a bluetooth keyboard/mouse.
Mostly though, it's a convenient backup server for the Linux laptops in our home, using rsync over ssh. It's great, and fits conveniently on a shelf next to my TV.
I think Apple hopes to do similar business with a Mac Mini Server. There's no optical drive, so I'm curious about that ... but if you want to set up a small server in your home, I'm sure Apple would love to sell you this thing. Small, fits on a shelf, great for home use.
I don't see this being used at the office, unless someone works in a small business (less than 100 people) that doesn't have their own server room, and wants to set up a small web server or file server.
The mac mini is already in use in server farms. Apparently it's size and low power consumption make it a good candidate in a server farm. Check it out yourself:
http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/13019/Mac+Mini+Server+Farm.html
Say NO to unpaid Internships!
Doing RAID without swappable drives is INSANE.
Have you gone inside of a mini? I have. I can't imagine
any of the pretentious types that would buy this sort of
machine would appreciate the experience.
I don't even like to go inside of "normal PCs" for
futzing around with drives. That why my "big boxes"
all have hotswap trays for the bulk storage. Even a
case intended to be worked on poses a potential for
disaster.
This is why "real servers" and storage arrays have
things like externally exposed hot swap drive bays.
This mini exposes the limitations of the current mini
form factor and highlights why they need something else.
A "double wide" mini with room for cardbus slots or the
aforementioned hotswap bays could be quite cool in this
respect without sacrificing much in the way of the current
visual coolness.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Its operating system is Mach. Its operating environment is based on FreeBSD and its GUI is based on NeXTSTEP. A stock standard OS X machine is not running any FreeBSD tools 99.99% of the time except at boot or some configuration stages. There is also some FreeBSD code added in some of the Mach layers.
Don't use the Guest Account!
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.
Are you living in a communist country where competition is prohitibed by the government or something?
You must not be familiar with how the US govt works.
Score: -3 (Pedantic)
I'll ignore the issue of whether or not OS X makes for a good server. Instead, I'd like to make clear that Mac OS X (Darwin) is not "just BSD." Its userland is from BSD. Apart from that, there is not much else that is shared. Most especially, they each have different kernels. That alone makes it impossible to say that Mac OS X has to be a good server OS just because (Free)BSD is.
"Server" isn't particular hardware. Anything can be a server, it just not be the *proper* server for a given usage.
You even note it in your objection: "...Linux, MySQL [server software] and Apache [HTTP server software]"
You're confusing the terms "enterprise class server configuration" with "server".
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?
Dual ethernet is pretty much a standard feature for a small office server, lets you set up firewalls, remote access and other public-side facing services. And they could have made space for it by removing a few of the USB ports, 5 USB ports seems kinda overkill for a machine that isn't intended for desktop use.
FWIW I haven't used OSX Server in a few years but last time I did the GUI config tools were okay but not amazing. Some of the services were pretty smooth to config, but the hard stuff was still hard. For example to setup Apache you still pretty much had to be an expert in httpd.conf arcana even though you didn't actually have to edit the files by hand (usually).
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I've been running OS X Server in a SOHO situation for several years, including hosting some websites, LDAP-based network login, OS X Mobile accounts on laptops (laptop synchs when it's back in the home network) and file sharing.
Last week I got a new low-end Mini and a copy of Snow Leopard Server, at about the same cost as the new product. My Mini is only 2.0ghz, compared to 2.5ghz, and has only 1, 120gb, disk drive vs the 2x 500gb drives. But those drives are 5400rpm, and you give up the optical drive for the second hard drive. My big disappointment with this (besides it coming out a week after I bought something a bit less capable) is that I think they should have added at least one and preferably 2 eSATA ports (and given up 2 USB ports.)
I'm looking forward to trying out the Wiki server, and also the new 'connect to home' facility that is something like a very simplified VPN, that's new in Snow Leopard Server.
Administering Snow Leopard Server is very little like handling Unix servers, with one exception. You still need to pore through logfiles for security issues, etc. But the late Leopard Server (X.5.6 or so) and now Snow Leopard server "server preferences" are likely to provide a relatively knowledgeable user with the ability to set up a functional server in, literally, 10 minutes (voice of experience...) That's assuming you have a DNS that provides domain name/IP mapping, and you're doing simple LDAP or already have an LDAP server (including Active Directory, but I don't have any experience with AD or mixed Windows/Mac integration.)
Clearly this is not for someone who needs computational power in a server. But a pair of servers, using a shared (NAS) disk, and some sort of mechanism that can do hot-backup/rollover at the edge, could be a very workable relatively high-reliability situation for someone. But more importantly, I think this is a very attractive product for small offices, particularly with some sort of FW800 or NAS RAID mirrored/redundant disk enclosure.
Oh, and someone asked how you do an install without an optical drive in the server: "There's more than one way to do this." MacOS provides remote disk (this was developed for the MacBook Air), so you slide your install DVD into another Mac with an optical drive and active remote disk. OR, you can use Firewire Target mode (one of the great Mac tricks of all time.) This is how I loaded my Leopard server double-density DVD onto an old G5 that did not have a double density DVD drive. I stuck it in my MacBook Pro, then rebooted the MBP into Firewire Target mode. I used a (FW800 - great performance) cable to plug that machine into the G5. All of the MBP's drives, including the DVD in the optical drive, mounted on the G5. Basically Target mode turns your Mac into the equivalent of an external disk enclosure for all drives/volumes on that machine. This is also super-cool for backup. I have an eSATA enclosure and a ExpressCard34 eSATA adapter for the MBP. I can do drive-dump level backups by putting the Mini into Firewire Target mode and then disk-dumping drive images onto my eSATA enclosure. (The eSATA enclosure is left over from that G5, which had a hardware RAID eSATA card in it. I was sorry to give that particular card up, it worked pretty well.)
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.
Let me ask again. Is this server, 'rackable'? How many Us?
4 Mac Minis will fit on this $58 2U tray..
Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing.
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.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (for Intel) is UNIX [opengroup.org]. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is not.
You're an idiot and a pedantic cretin for even bringing this up.
You just got troll'd!
People are already using Mini's as servers, there are co-lo's that offer Mac Mini's as "servers". Others are using them as display servers for overhead screens in their commandcenter with their OS X based system.(saw an article somewhere about some police command center that used a OS X based system)
So there is many places where you already can find racks of Mac Minis today so I'd say there is a demand for server minis with RAID disks.
I don't see what the big deal is. I've been using a Mac Mini G4 as a server for more than 3 years. It doesn't even need X Server on it. Mine has been faithfully serving as a Apache HTTPD/PostgreSQL/Tomcat/Postfix/SFTP and music/file server just fine - and with only one HD too (which had to be replaced after 2 years) and only 1GB of RAM. Sometimes I even hook up an external HD and have even MORE space available. Oh my!!
Mine just sits on a bookshelf, headless, and I use ARD as and if necessary. I'm an Apple fan, but there is no news on this one - I dunno why anyone could be excited about it, especially at the price. Go get a used Mini for less than half the cost and use it for the exact same thing.
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.
If you have another Mac, you can share its DVD drive across the network. CD/DVD sharing is built into OS X 10.6, and I think it was in 10.5 also. Apple also makes the software available to share a drive from a Windows PC. It even works for booting and OS reinstallation.
Likewise, if you have another Mac with firewire, you can also use its DVD drive via firewire target mode.
Or, if you're old-fashioned, any external USB or firewire DVD drive will most likely work.
~Philly
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...
You don't know from ridiculously overpriced. Try paying for an RS/6000, or worse, Windows Advanced License Revenue Generation Server.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I don't mind that it doesn't have a DVD drive; anyone depending on DVDs as a backup solution is already in for trouble (I've had burned discs go unreadable in as little as three months). Network backup solutions are the way to go for this, which any decent admin would implement.
Of course, that depends on the last statement holding true for whoever sets up any given server in an office...
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a 'server.'
I call something a 'server' if it is providing one or more services to other computers. It has nothing to do with the hardware or operating system used.
I've often redeployed old 'desktop' computers in server roles. At that point they become 'servers', whether or not they sport features like high speed, large capacity or redundancy.
The new Mac Mini is actually rated for "14 watts of power when idle", which Apple says is lower than any other computer in the EPA STAR database.
But wait, there's more! With Snow Leopard, Apple introduced a new "Wake on Demand" feature that could allow the Mini to be in sleep mode (~1.5W) most of the time, but still work as a server when needed:
(1) Airport base stations can now provide a "Bonjour Sleep Proxy" service that will keep announcing all the services your computer is hosting on the network, even after the computer goes to sleep. The base station will then wake the server whenever another computer tries to access it. It isn't clear whether this happens only for Bonjour services, or for any IP-based access (which should be possible in principle).
(2) All this magic can happen via the wireless network if your computer is new enough. (Wake-on-LAN was only possible via ethernet before.)
If the server is set to go back to sleep automatically after a few minutes of inactivity, this setup provides a low-power, always-on server arrangement: the computer sleeps most of the time, automatically wakes up whenever someone wants to connect to it, then goes back to sleep whenever it's not needed.