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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."
"more than half a dozen facilities" -> More than 6? Wow!
"have stayed externally, physically identical" -> Amazing! I wish there was a standard for servers, so that I wouldn't have to keep reconfiguring my data center layout.
Jeff
"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,"
Actually, with Dell you have a pretty good idea. They have defined life cycles for their servers, and they are pretty good about maintaining a general class of equipment. This is not the case for their low end consumer stuff necessarily, but the stuff you'd put in a datacenter.
Apple? Shit son, they'll change tack and tell nobody before hand. The Xserve is the best example. Their 1U server, a thing they sold for use in everything including super-computer like clusters. Then, suddenly it is gone. Just can't buy it anymore, no replacement. You need 1U equipment? Fuck you.
Or the Mac Pro, which is on sale, but they let get woefully out of date before updating.
Apple is the ultimate at doing whatever they want new whenever they want it. They are not at all interested in backward compatibility or consistency. They'll stick with a form as long as it suits them and then change.
Now that's fine, I'm not saying it isn't valid, however to act like they are good at stability for datacenters is silly. They are not at all. The next Mac mini could be a totally different form factor, or there could be NO next Mac mini. You don't know and Apple won't release any roadmap.
Heck a funny mini related incident is one of our professors does research with rovers he builds. They use Mac minis as their core controller because he's a Mac guy. They worked fine since they were small, and powered by DC they could hook up to the power supply for everything else. What's that you say? They aren't DC powered? Ahh yes, well a couple generations ago Apple changed it, stuck the PSU inside the unit. Great for consumers, bad for him. He's now stockpiled some older ones to use when they break and is trying to come up with a long term plan.
To me this reads like a Mac zealot trying to justify their use of them as a good thing rather than a well thought out argument for why they are good in the datacenter.
I see. You object to people using the tool that they know how to use, and insist they use your preferred tool instead. That's pretty typical of IT Admin types.
No, I don't think you really do see. He told a story about some people at a university who wanted the IT department to support a unique one-off system, the IT department said no. I guess they could have said yes and handed them a bill for all of the extra overhead involved, but the result would probably have been the same.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Well, what do you expect. It's not a story, it's an ad.
Depends on its intended purpose. You can use desktop hardware as a "server"' if it's nothing mission critical. The complete understanding that you have no redundancy or data integrity and your willing to weigh the cost risk as a business decision. Sometimes failure is cheaper than uptime.
Life is not for the lazy.
Your post is just such an obvious contradiction.
"It doesn't change. But all of the meaningful elements change".
Back when I was using Minis for MythTV I had 3 of them. They each had their own video dongle because each one of them had a different video port. Such a simple basic thing wasn't the same from one release to the next.
As far as a datacenter goes, there are standards and Apple gear does not conform to them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Dell will sell you a 2U (R820) system that can have 4 processors in it up to 2.7GHz and 8 cores each. It can then take 1.5TB of RAM, 16 2.5" drives (magnetic or SSD) 7 PCIe cards and so on. You'd better believe you can stick more than 40 VMs on that sucker, and you can get another one in 5U with 1U to spare.
Or you can go blade server, Dell has options here though IBM has higher density solutions available, if what you want are a lot of systems in a small amount of space.
All of this supports real enterprise stuff like redundant power, ECC RAM, RAID-6 hot-swap drives, central monitoring, failed component isolation, and so on.
Piling a bunch of consumer computers in a rack doesn't really make a lot of sense, particularly ones not designed with good cooling solutions. When you start doing real high density on computers, cooling is a real issue. Servers are made to deal with it, the vent in the front, out the rear so you have have hot/cool zones and they have high speed fans if they need to spin up due to ambient increases. Mac Minis rely by and large on diffusing heat through their cases and a tiny vent at the back, which is not a winning scenario in a dense situation.
You are going to get better power usage in any large scale by bigger systems with virtualization and having them stand up and down as needed. You can do that with real servers that have full lights out management (Dell calls it iDRAC). As load on the servers rise, new servers can be powered on and made read to the cluster as needed. Also all that high end stuff can buy you realtime failover and migration so things can be shifted around as needed.
All this gets rather feasible with the costs you are talking. 8 Mac Mini servers is, minimum, $8000. That gets you 4GB per system, a 2.3 GHz quad per system, and 2 1TB drives. Because I bought one recently I can tell you that you can get a Dell R720xd will run you about $9000ish for 2x 2.6GHz 8 core CPUs, 128GB of RAM (aftermarket) and 6 1TB HDs (which will let you do RAID-6 with a hot spare and have 3TB of space). I'm not seeing what the minis gain you, and I can give you a list of things they don't have.
For all that, it is a similar power profile. The Macs spec in at about 680 watts total, the Dell has redundant 750 watt PSUs though in my testing only pulled about 600 at max load.
All that in less than half the rack space.
So other than "It can run OS-X" what are you getting with a ton o' minis?