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Among Servers, Apple's Mac Mini Quietly Gains Ground
Nerval's Lobster writes "In 2005, the first business to offer colocated Mac Minis inside a data center made its debut, provoking criticism on Slashdot of everything from how the Mini was cooled to the underlying business model. But nowadays, more than half a dozen facilities are either hosting their own Mac Minis for rent, or offering colocation services for individual consumers and businesses. While some vendors declined to give out reliability information, those who did claimed a surprisingly small number of failures. 'If Dell makes a small little machine, you don't know that they'll be making that, in that form factor, six months down the road, or what they're going to do, or how they're going to refresh it,' Jon Schwenn, a network engineer for CyberLynk Networks (which owns Macminivault) said in an interview. 'We've had three model years of Minis that have stayed externally, physically identical.' Customers are using Minis for all sorts of things: providing Mail, iCal, and the Websites for small businesses; databases, like Filemaker or Daylite; as a VPN server for those who want an IP address in the United States; build servers for Xcode; and general personal servers for Plex media streaming and other fun projects. Some are even using it for Windows."
What most of you fail to understand is the TCO. The hardware costs nothing in comparison to how little time they need for setup and maintenance. If one fails, big deal; get a new one and restore it from the backup and it's running with a few minutes of work. Need more capacity or redundancy? Just get another and it's running within minutes. Need more demanding mass storage and/or networking? Plug that into the convenient external PCIe bus (Thunderbolt). Basically lim(0) setup time there too.
I still run my own servers as dedicated co-located generic Linux boxes, but the setup still takes roughly a day; not hours or minutes. That time isn't billable and I schedule it to days I can't do anything productive. If something fails without warning and requires immediate action, it's a day subtracted from writing billable hours of code, which per se costs about the same as a Mac Mini Server. For the customers of mine who need dedicated units for one reason or another, the Mac Minis pay for themselves just in the initial setup work alone, and they can manage them by themselves, just like my mom is able to manage her MacBook with maybe a support call every few years, when she wants an opinion on a hardware upgrade or such.
After the Mac Mini servers got the i7 CPU's, none of my customers chose a Linux option when presented with the cost breakdown. From the software perspective, my code isn't picky about which Unix or unix-like it's running on. Almost anything goes, as long as the system dependencies are installed. OS X Server just happens to have all the system dependencies preinstalled in the shipping configuration as well as everything else they typically might need.
In a small or medium scale setup or a large scale setup of heterogenous systems, Linux is cheap only if time doesn't cost anything, or the comparison baseline is something even worse; Microsoft Windows or such. Linux-based setups may also be feasible for certain large scale installations of homogenous nodes.
I have an original 1.42 Ghz mini sitting on my desk running nightly reports. It was a CFO's desktop for a year, (for a tiny company), and it's been running reports since then.
iCal repeating events tell Filemaker to query MSSQL databases, which outputs Excel files, which are manipulated using Applescript. Mail emails the finished and highly formatted reports to various people in the company. Pretty damned easy to work with, given the magic "Record" button. I used to have it print overnight, but that became too old school.
It still has the Apple serial number in the disk info box - never even been formatted. Still has 512K Ram. Never misses a beat. I guess for 8 years now. Put that ROI in your pipe and smoke it.
I should still probably get around to backing it up someday..
Do you have the slightest idea what you are talking about? The current Mac Mini (post 2010) is 196x196x36mm and the AC cord plugs directly into it. The physical first generation (2005-2010) was 170x170x51mm and had an external power brick. That is not "externally, physically identical".
The question is, what's the processing or storage density of a bunch of Mac Minis vs a racked configuration?
You can place 4 Mac Mini boxes in on a 1U rack shelf, assuming the shelf runs the entire depth of the rack. With the 4-core, 8-thread Core i7 processor in the current models, you can get slightly better thread density than most other 1U servers. For memory, other 1U servers will do much better than the 64GB mas combined in the Macs. For storage, the Mini loses badly, as it can only hold two 2.5" drives, and cannot easily or securely connect to a SAN (as it would have to be on the same layer 2 network as the Ethernet connection to the Internet).
Since you are paying for a lot of things you won't use in a colo environment (WiFi, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt, IR receiver, Firewire, SD card slot, audio), you could almost certainly build a machine of the same specs (and close to the same form factor) for less. The only real advantage is that you can sell people individual physical servers if they don't trust virtual machines for some reason. If you go virtual, you can quite easily put more utilized processor, memory, and hard disk in the same amount of rack space as the Mac Mini setup, but you likely couldn't do it with 1U systems.