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Apple To Discontinue Xserve
Toe, The writes "Apple has announced that they are discontinuing their line of 1u rack-mount servers. With their usual understated style, the announcement comes in the form of a box on their website and a transition guide (PDF) to their low-end Mac mini server or their now-more-powerful-than-Xserve Mac Pro server. Attitudes about the Xserve have ranged from considering it a token nod to enterprise to an underpowered wimp to a tremendous value. Apparently, the migration to Intel processors removed some of the value of clustering Xserves, leaving them somewhat overpriced compared to other, more traditional offerings. The odd thing is that Apple clearly has shown they have the capacity for enterprise, but rarely the will to take it on. So, does the discontinuation of their rack-mount mean they have abandoned enterprise for their post-PC offerings, or are they simply acknowledging that their products aren't gaining traction in the data center? Or do they have something else up their sleeve for next year?"
It would never dawn on me to use a Mac for anything other than the desktop. While I'm sure that they make perfectly capable server products, I would wager that the perception that Apple is primarily suited for making products that target the end user rather than the enterprise is a substantial hurdle for Apple. Frankly, I think that this is one of the hurdles that keeps Linux from being as widely adopted as a desktop platform. People hear *nix and, if they think anything at all, they think "server."
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If it is stored in a rack mount somewhere in the basement? I thought the point was that others could see the Apple logo and see how different (and better) you are.
I think the only people who got these things were Mac Fanboys. Don't get me wrong, I like Mac. But I would never have recommended Apple Servers in a business settings.
1. You are stuck on one platform. It is like getting a Sun Solaris platform but worse because apple never really had a strong enterprise department.
2. You didn't get any real extra functionality over a Linux/BSD even Windows servers.
3. There is 0 fore-site on what will happen for the next version. What new features. Apple is too closed
4. You had limited options. So that means you are paying for stuff you don't need
5. Limited server tools. Sure the Apple stuff is good but you need that one extra tool that apple doesn't support.
Like Apple or Hate Apple, it really isn't a good server platform.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well I guess that answers the question about what *didn't* go in that big new data center.
In a previous life several years ago we looked at buying 300 of them to run Yellow Dog (yes, several years). They were nicely engineered units, but Apple clearly wasn't series about enterprise sales. They offered a kit of spare parts for field replacements, but not much beyond that.
Apple's hardware support was abysmal for their servers. And by support, I'm not talking about drivers, I'm talking about their ability to fix a broken system.
I've called Apple to get parts for failed Xserves, and they have taken WEEKS to ship for systems covered under applecare. They also think it's entirely fine to tell you to bring an Xserve in to an authorized repair center. I mean, *what?*
Just because a server is available in a 1U form factor doesn't mean it's an enterprise system. You can't support enterprise hardware the same way you support iPods.
I would say good luck getting OSX to drive your HP's SCSI array, or your Dell's quad-port NIC.
Compatibility lists are always your friend in the land of hackintosh. You might be able to do something with 3U or 4U generic cases. Support would likely go out the window too.
The move would make sense if Apple were a car company(ha! car metaphor ftw!) Discontinuing one line of a car company's models has almost 0 effect on the other model that company makes. However in computing, esp. with a company like Apple, it's actually a different beast. While the XServe may not have had many sales by itself, it really was an enabler for companies to move more stuff towards the mac(and by extension iOS devices). Apple's biggest strength really has been that they are a one stop shop for your entire computing ecosystem. You can move your company to Apple, and while you will pay a little bit more for the hardware, the fact that Apple has designed the whole ecosystem(hardware, software etc) to work with eachother means that you will save money and time when it comes to support. However recently with the discontinuation of Java and now the XServe Apple is really saying, "We are a gizmo company. We make other stuff, but if it isn't gizmo related we really don't care'
The knock-on effects of this decision are going to be pretty bad for Apple. Apple was finally making inroads in the enterprise, only to do something as stupid as this. Not only that, companies now have 0 faith in the future of Apple. They have shown time and again that they have 0 problems discontinuing product lines/platforms on a whim. How is a developer supposed to plan anything when Apple can just cancel it? Are we really supposed to put our reputation with our customers(which translates into our livelihoods in a lot of circumstances) in Steve's hands when he has shown 0 qualms about discontinuing products at a moments notice? You can bet that any sysadmin/architect who convinced their boss to buy XServes in the past couple months is so is worried sick about how said boss will interpret this news. And you can be sure as shit that said sysadmin won't be nearly as enthusiastic about Apple products in the future. I know I'm not.
Steve is destroying the very thing that made him big in the first place, and I wonder how much longer Apple will even be around. They seem to be putting all their eggs in the consumer products basket, and there is a long line of companies that don't exist or are a shell of their former selves who went down that exact same road. AAPL will be at 0 before decades end unless someone stops Steve, and probably even if they do. I'm waiting until WWDC when Apple reveals Lion to short AAPL big time.
Monstar L
That my friend is one of the greatest problems with Mac/Linux adoption, IT boys are affraid of loosing "power" and are not willing to learn anything new. I speak as a IT boy who supports both Mac and linux servers, but I learned to loose that fear and jump right in . I find it to be much easier to maintain a OS X server or a linux server than to maintain Windowze ....
IBM - Market cap of $182 Billion with $23.7 billion quarterly revenue
Apple - Market cap of $291 Billion with $20.3 billion quarterly revenue
IBM is substantially bigger.
Now there are many ways for measuring the size of a business but one widely-accepted method is market cap.
As of 11:57 AM EDT or so:
Apple's market cap: 291.57B
IBM's market cap: 182.11B
By at least one common measuring method you can see that it is Apple which is substantially bigger than IBM.
Sapere aude!
I'm the system admin for a large design company (4 Xservers and one XRaid that replaced 4 Linux boxes about 4 years ago). This is pretty fucking awful news for us, and I'll lay out the reasons:
1. Apple's servers are very easy to manage. Much easier than Windows or Linux machines.
2. Apple's Workgroup management features are much easier to use than the Windows or Linux equivalents.
3. Apple File Sharing being able to mix AFP/SMB and NFS seamlessly was world class.
All of this led to large productivity gains in that much less time was being spent on admin tasks than necessary.
So now that's gone.
Shit.
And, what worries me more is that I can see Apple killing traditional OSX on Macs in favour of iOS as well.
I think Apple just lost a customer in us because we can't trust them anymore.
What do you in your datacenter that would result in a server becoming airborne?
Oh, and you've never had a server crash?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Not at all, it means that the market for companies that have racks and want to run OS X Server is small. Now they have the Mac Mini Server, they have a product that can go into small offices that don't have somewhere for a rack-mounted system.
The XServe was never a product that Apple created to sell. They created it because they have a lot of data centres of their own (to drive their site, the QuickTime Movie Trailers hosting, Apple Store, iTunes Store, and so on) and they didn't want to be buying a load of servers from a competitor to run them. They sold it because, having already designed and built it for un-house use there was no reason not to, but the potential market for a rack-mounted OS X box was small enough that it wouldn't have been worth their while designing it just for sale.
So what does this announcement actually mean? That they are no longer planning on using XServes in their own data centres. My guess is that they're planning on having their ARM team design a Cortex A15 SoC with ethernet, crypto hardware, and SATA on die and make tiny blade servers for internal use. They almost certainly won't want to ship OS X Server for ARM for external use, because supporting another architecture would be a lot of effort for little return, but they might do if the market looks big enough.
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And yet, sadly, this article does not have the "And nothing of value was lost" tag.
Well, perhaps businesses will understand that, and understand that going all Mac has problems because of that.
That's a silly conclusion to come to. No one suggests that business go "all Mac", except maybe small businesses which are wholly unaffected by this.
Similarly, it would be problematic for businesses to go all Linux (in fact, that's more problematic than going all Mac, although still feasible on smaller scales, and very feasible if limited solely to the data center, although Solaris and AIX have a place there too).
Going all Windows is somewhat more feasible, but even that breaks down as server needs increase.
Actually, I think the previous post is probably right, at least in the long run.
If there's one thing the popularity of iPhone/iPad had demonstrated, it's that most people don't really use their computers much. They have a hugely capable desktop machine that they use for "facebook", email, and "youtube", and that's about it for most of them.
I'm a pretty hardcore penguinista myself, but even I doubt that a standard full-service (by today's "PC" standards) Linux desktop will ever conquer the market, or even a large minority of it. However, I think the current "desktop" market is mostly doomed outside of "enterprise" and hardcore power-user settings. Now that "consumer" gadgets have gotten cheap and powerful enough to do what the great majority of "users" seem to do with their computers, there's no need for it any more. All those people who are "completely befuddled when they don't see the start button" will be migrating their way over to even-simpler environments like Android and iOS and perhaps Windows 7 Series 7 Phone 7 Series (or whatever they were calling it), which I actually kind of expect will cannibalize BlackBerry for corporate users.
My personal prediction: Microsoft is busy fossilizing into the New IBM (firmly embedded in many "corporate" environments but fading out of the "consumer" market), while Apple clamps down on its users and gets increasingly ruthless with its market control to become the New Microsoft. I expect Linux to grow solidly on the internet server side and on corporate servers.
I actually expect the Android/Apple landscape in the "consumer" side to end up looking a lot like the Microsoft/Apple market now - I'm guessing we'll end up with a solid majority made up of various Android devices, with Apple being a minority (but a relatively large and reliable one).
There, a free wild prediction, and you didn't even have to look at ads on ZDNet or some other commercial publication to get it.
tl;dr: Yes, I agree that Microsoft will likely hold onto the "traditional desktop" market for as long as that market stays around, but I don't think that market is going to exist for that much longer now.
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That's a whole lot of speculation.
The way I remember it, Apple sold a lot of Xserves into media environments, for digital video processing, basic file storage, etc. Musicians and A/V professionals have a natural affinity for Macs and little interest in maintaining servers, so a plug-and-play server that worked with their Macs was a natural choice. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly large market.
Xserves were nice machines, but building and maintaining bulletproof server hardware -- including continually producing new models that keep up with the ongoing upgrade cycles from Intel and other component vendors -- just doesn't make sense if the products aren't competitive in the market. And Apple's servers weren't going to be competitive until it started shipping models with Linux and/or Windows Server as an option. Instead, Apple tried to be Sun and found out it simply didn't have the expertise and market savvy to be Sun -- and then, look what happened to Sun.
They almost certainly won't want to ship OS X Server for ARM for external use, because supporting another architecture would be a lot of effort for little return, but they might do if the market looks big enough.
So they're going to use it exclusively in-house, to the extent that they're going to replace all their Xserves, but they don't have enough faith in the ARM port to sell it? Just the fact that they put it into production use in-house means they'd have to "support" it. I think you're reaching.
Breakfast served all day!
- Desktops.
- Interoperability with the outside Windows world.
- Sometimes absolutely shitty hardware support.
- Sometimes kludgy solutions to problems that are elegantly solved by proprietary software.
I don't mean to say that you can't make an all Linux solution work, but you can also make an all Windows solution work, and an all Mac solution work. For all the problems I listed, there are ways to work around them, but that doesn't make them non-problems, just like every single Windows and Mac problem can be worked around as well.
There are also scenarios where going monoculture can be no problem. For example an ISP could go 100% Linux, no problem. An art studio could go 100% Mac, no problem. And a stock broker could go 100% Windows, no problem.
But just as it's the hard and honest truth that going all Windows or all Mac can be problematic, the truth is that going all Linux brings with it its own problems.