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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)
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.
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.
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
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."
Don't use the Guest Account!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.