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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?"
The Xserve has been largely redundant since Apple discontinued the Xraid. When you pair them up they make great file servers, the publishing company I used to work for loved them (yup, that's right, there *are* people for whom Apple servers make sense, go home haters).
Seeing as how there's nothing you can do with an Xserve that you can't do with a Mac Pro, the only difference is the rackmounting. Considering the way forward is Xsan, that's completely optional now even if all your storage is rackmounted. The SAN controller can be on the other side of the building as long as your fibre reaches it.
Nice as it was, goodbye redundant product. You'll be missed, but not for long.
It's not the 'ooo shiny' products that everyone knows Apple for, but their Server OS is quite good. As are some of their clustering capabilities.
After trying to setup a linux cluster, XGrid is nothing short of Magic. It's a check box in a system control panel. You can let anyone use a computer or password protect it. Buy 1+ Macs. Check "Allow for use on XGrid" (and even set to only use when it's been idle). Anytime you compile something in XCode, all other available Macs will be used. No setting up which servers to use in a .distcc file.
Their Server OS is also pretty polished. I know the hard core command line junkies think that everything should be done with vi/emacs and only configured from there. But not everyone wanting to run a server has that expertise. If I had to suggest a server to a friend for a small home business. I'd suggest the MacMini Server. Mail, Web, Jabber, OS Updates, Time Machine, etc.
I suggest checking it out (not sure if they have the server OS setup in any Apple Store) before knocking it.
I really did like Time Machine for ease of use, but I will find something for Linux, or create my own based around rsync.
Having had problems sorting a Time Machine replacement out under Linux, I installed FreeNAS on a spare box - just add and configure the drives, select the option to run a Time Machine server, and you're away - I was very impressed with the ease of use.
Ad agencies with a lot of Mac infrastructure disagree. OS X server is a stable beast on the Xserve hardware. This is a giant fuck you to companies that went with a Mac OS X infrastructure (Open Directory, XSan, AFP and SMB file services on a single machine). 8+ cores and 16GB ram and its a hell of a machine to use for production AND even run several VMs, without any real performance degradation.
I actually liked the overpriced son of a bitch xserve.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you worked in an organization where you hand to manage hundreds of desktop Macs it would dawn on you. I know places like that are not exactly everywhere, but they do exist...I know because I work at one. After our current Xserves reach the end of their useful life, there will be absolutely no enterprise class hardware that can be used for management and deployment of desktops. I'm sorry, but we will not be putting Minis on rack shelves for services (Open Directory, for example) that need to be available 24x7. The lack of redundant power supplies, lights out management and hot swappable drives is just not acceptable in an enterprise datacenter. I also cannot give up 6u per Mac Pro just to get the same 8-core speed that is currently available in a 1u box while I'm giving up those availability features. It's just not going to happen.
We're already pondering what life is going to be like with Windows-only desktops. It's possible Apple is going to pull off some announcement about OSX server availability on VMWare/HyperV or something (which would be acceptable for larger environments I guess) but I can't plan ahead for what they *might* announce. Frankly, it doesn't give me confidence in the future of OSX server in general. Without large deployments, people won't be needing things like Open Directory, so that could easily be dropped at some point, for example.
They are effectively removing themselves from consideration in large environments. Just a week or two ago, there were rumors they were going to make a bigger play in the enterprise space and I was anxious to see what they had in the pipeline. Now, suddenly we're looking at abandoning OSX as a platform almost completely at hundreds of desktops. We were about to put in an order for 50+ iMacs for the second or third time this year alone, but now those plans are on hold until we can get a new long term plan together. As a result, it is definitely going to be a factor in future iPad/iPhone deployment (which has been pretty positive thus far).
I never doubted Apple was evil, I didn't know they were dumb too.
teeker
I've been administering XServes for nearly five years now and I can say that OS X Server and the XServes it runs on are, far and away, the worst combination of "server" OS and hardware I've ever had the misfortune to use.
The first XServe we had was a dual 1.33GHz G4. It ran 10.4. First, the hardware...The rack rails were horrible. The top of the 1U box stayed with the rails in the rack. There was only one power supply and there was no option for hot-swap/redundant PSUs. Cable management? Ha...You got a clip to keep the power cord in the PSU. That's it. The damned thing didn't even have link LEDs. The only redeeming hardware feature were the somewhat-decent drive sleds. The motherboard finally died in the thing a few years ago.
The second XServe, our current unit, is a single 2.8GHz quad-core Xeon machine. It...Doesn't suck from a hardware point of view. The rack rails don't make me cry. There are link LEDs. I don't remember if there's cable-management, but I want to say no. There are redundant, hot-swap PSUs available. So, to sum up, it's on par feature-wise with 1U rack boxes from Dell/IBM from five years ago in every way except for the CPU. Good going, Apple.
OS X Server? No, thanks. 10.5 has been moderately solid, once we figured out the Spotlight issue that was causing the box to require a hard power-cycle once a month. Of course, every time I start to get comfortable with OS X Server Apple comes along and shoots themselves in the foot, usually with something stupid like breaking CPAN, breaking their own packaged webmail (Squirrelmail) by not paying attention to the PHP updates they're shipping, breaking their own ClamAV in such a way that it actually crashes the machine at random and shipping an update that causes serialnumberd to lock you out of your own box due the mistaken notion that you're running two instances of OS X Server if your OS X Server machine has two interfaces on the same subnet.
Let's not forget the 10.6 AFP bugs, the 10.4 AFP bug that would let me reliably crash the XServe if I tried to mount an AFP share a second time after the first mount request didn't succeed, and so on.
I suppose you're right...They are capable of making server products. They just refuse to. Either they don't eat their own dog food internally, their RE/QA guys are asleep at the switch or I'm just terribly unlucky, but for me I'll never willingly choose to use OS X Server.
Apple throwing in the towel on the XServe has been something I've expected for a while. I can count on one hand the number of people actually running XServes with an Apple OS in production, and I work on a major university campus. The resources required to compete for even a small slice of the enterprise pie just aren't there for Apple. They're too busy playing with phones and mp3 players. I don't blame them for doing so, but I am happy to see them truly, finally, exit the real enterprise arena.
This has always, always been the Apple way. For better AND worse, Apple is a "We do what we want," kind of company. They set their own path, decide what they think the market REALLY wants, and so on. This has good sides, it leads to them trying new things that other companies wouldn't and ignoring some conventional wisdom. That has lead to some extremely popular products in the consumer electronics space. However the bad side is that they do not consider the needs of their partners, and their clients, in enterprise. They'll change their mind on how shit is done, not tell you first, not give you a migration strategy, and that is that.
Two good somewhat recent examples would be the move to Intel hardware and the discontinuation of the 64-bit Carbon API. In the case of the Intel transition, everything was kept heavily under wraps. They admitted after it was done that they'd been working on it for years, even using OS-X on Intel in demonstrations, however it was all kept very hush hush. Suddenly PPC was no longer available and it was all Intel. So if you were heavily invested in PPC hardware, well fuck you. In the case of 64-bit Carbon they said it'd be supported, provided beta APIs and so on, and companies like Adobe were using it. Then they suddenly said "Nah, changed our mind, you have to use Cocoa," leaving companies like Adobe in a lurch.
Apple has never taken enterprise support seriously, their mentality is just not aligned with it. They want to be able to change everything, do what they think is cool at the time and so on. It has worked wonderfully for them in the consumer electronics space, but that is NOT what is needed in the enterprise world.
Well, perhaps businesses will understand that, and understand that going all Mac has problems because of that. Apple may pay lip service to the business market, but it isn't what they are good at doing. They can and will change their minds on how things are done on no notice and leave you to deal with the results.
Yes, they have something else up their sleeve. Did anybody notice Apple's "enterprise services agreement" with Unisys? http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apple-Unisys-Agree-to-Enterprise-Services-Deal-Report-788654/ Did anybody notice the 54% drop in Unisys's profits, along with a drop in server sales? http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Unisys-3Q-profit-sinks-54-pct-apf-3818156357.html?x=0&.v=1 So, Unisys is an enterprise computing company looking for a way to save its server business. Apple is consumer electronics company with enterprise ambitions, enterprise software, but no enterprise distribution network. Apple just announced it is dropping its server hardware line, a little over a week after announcing the deal with Unisys. I know it is fashionable to dismiss Apple's enterprise computing ambitions. I was at an Apple Developer's seminar a couple years ago where they were showing off the new version (then) of MacOS X Server. The entire focus of that seminar was on how Apple was adding features to MacOS X Server (and even licensing things from Microsoft) to make OS X Server more suitable for the enterprise. I predict Unisys will start offering MacOS X Server on Unisys server hardware soon. Apple may even end up buying Unisys.