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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."
Customers are using Minis for all sorts of things: ... Some are even using it for Windows.
I guess the moral of the story is "beauty is only skin deep".
#DeleteChrome
just changs things.
HAHAHA. NO I kid. Apple changes thing without notice all the time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is this a new fad or something? Some tweaker rolled into my office wanting to know if we did consulting for setting up a webserver on an apple platform. We only did windows/linux. I questioned him on why he wouldnt just use a linux box for webhosting? He didnt have an answer.
Is this just some hipster fad? Finding a use for old Apple boxes? Or do they offer something that linux/windows hosting doesn't?
These are great little machines. I have had two and want another. Oh, and I am agnostic when it comes to these things, but I do give credit where credit is due.
Even the "server" version of the Mac Mini does not support ECC RAM. Many other important server-grade features, such as IPMI, are also missing. Why would anyone choose this over cheaper, more robust commodity PC server hardware? You can't even plead cosmetics, because it's a freaking server; it goes in a rack somewhere and only a handful of IT staff ever need to see it. The only possible reason I can think of why someone would want to run an OSX server is if they were going to be remote-accessing it to run Xcode for iOS development. What else can you do on OSX that you can't do on Windows or Linux?
"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
So 7 hosting companies out of how many? It seems like this was written to just make a quick dig away Dell (same model numbers with completely different hardware inside).
"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.
That's the only reason. Apple won't allow for OS-X to be virtualized on non-Mac hardware. vSphere would be perfectly capable of handling it, VMWare has their software on Mac, has Mac integration tools, etc but Apple won't allow it. So if you want OS-X in your datacenter, you have to buy a Mac and since there is no Xserve anymore it is a mini or a pro. Well the pros are really expensive, and quite large (like 4U if you got mounting hardware) so Minis it is.
There really isn't a good reason in most cases, but then fanboys have never needed a good reason. We had a case where people asked for it. A department hired some fairly clueless ex-students that have a "web consulting company" to make a site for them. Said students are Maccies. They wanted a Mac server, running Wordpress to develop on. We said you can have Wordpress (though we tried to talk them out of it) on Apache on Linux because that's what our sites run, we aren't buying a Mac server for you.
I support one running windows. Died once. Was horrible to replace the drive as their was a ton of drives it would not support 2-3 years later.
Once I was able to replace it with a drive it would support I had no issues. The thing is rock solid, cool, and quiet, unlike most of my other big metal.
Why you ask? Not sure- I inherited it, assumed it was a beg borrow and steal sort of thing.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
I run on a mac mini server at home (business class internet connection), and it's fine, but I was using XServHosting (with which I had HORRIBLE business experience, highly not recommended) I agree with the assessment on ECC memory: if you want to run a REAL server, get a VM and run it on real hardware. If you want to run a mini at home or in a small office, sure, but paying hosting company rates? It's a complete waste.
News? This is a slashvertisement.
The missing bit that strikes me here is the serial console. If a server does not boot anymore and you want to go single user to fix things, the serial console is convenient, as it allows you to do it without going into the data center an hook a keyboard and a screen.
I tend to be a mac person on the desktop, but I am not convinced by mac servers since the day they retired their 1U Xserve
Why people insist on using an HTPC oriented machine that is clearly not marketed at server-esque operations is beyond me.
apple markets them with OS X Server OS as a server solution.
Ken
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.
Four cores pegged is 100% CPU utilization.
If you we're paying colo fees, the monthly fee for a MacMini would be a fraction of what you would pay for that 1U server. I can colo a MacMini for around $20-40/month, what does it cost to colo your 1U server?
That monthly fee makes a difference to many potential customers, and a 'pimped out' MacMini with n i7 CPU, 16 gig of RAM and two Drives is just a bit more than your 1U $700 box.
Ken
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..
Something tells me that we will see Intel NUC colo soon as well.
Good-bye
No raid. No ecc reg ram. No ipmi*. No thanks. What happened to Xserves? Everybody switched to Linux.
*not that I use ipmi, but its presence marks a serious machine room server
I have had an Intel Mac mini running XP for a home surveillance monitor/server 24/7 for approx. 5 years and it has *never* crashed, and I do a preventative restart about every 60 days. Simultaneously, I have had the identical software running on an identical install of XP on no less than 4 different PC hardware with similar CPUs (both Intel and AMD) and RAM with regular, almost daily crashing, BSD, or freezing.
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If you're installing that many boxes, why don't you have a preconfigured linux install that you can just dump onto the drive of a target box?
You should be able to set one up once, dump it to storage somewhere, and just image it onto the target hardware.
Seriously. Mod parent up.
Want to run Mac OS X in your VMware ESXi infrastructure? It needs to be on Apple branded hardware. With the death of the Xserve, what's a data center to do? Mac Pro is way too much of a space hog for racks. Enter the Mac mini. Sure, no ECC ram, no IPMI, no dual power supplies, etc. However, licensing requirements are pushing this change. If Mac OS X could be legally virtualized on non-Apple branded hardware, I guarantee there would be many fewer Mac mini servers in the data center.
The i7 mac mini makes a really cool home ESXi server (to learn vmware and run lots of different OSs).
It even runs Mountain Lion under visualization. (legally I might add).
You do understand that OS X has all the prerequisites his app needs and ships pre-installed on the hardware, right? Why does he need to prepare his own image? What problem would that solve - it would add work to his roll-out process...
Ken
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?
Then you are doing it wrong. The right answer if you want minimal fucking around time is good hardware, with good support, in a failover cluster. You get some VMWare or Hyper-V servers set up. You have them in a failover setup so that if one goes down, the VMs just hop over to another one. Same deal with scaling. Things getting full? Introduce a new system to the cluster, have it rebalance the VMs. Not only that standing up new systems becomes really quick since you can have images bases you just copy, or if it needs to be done from scratch and ISO file you mount. You can do it all at home, and very quickly.
I'm not talking hypothetically here, this is stuff we do. You virtualize things and have enough hardware capacity that a failure doesn't take shit out.
Also you'll find that the server class hardware is way more reliable. In the Dell servers we have, most things that go wrong often are hot swap. PSUs, HDDs, and fans are all hot swap. If one fails, you get a new one sent out, and swap it in while the system is running. No downtime. RAM and CPUs aren't hot swap but generally it can isolate a bad one, and the system can continue running until a downtime is convenient (we've had a bad RAM stick isolated in a server before). You also have total remote monitoring of the hardware with OpenManage and/or iDRAC. I mean it looks at everything: Power usage, temperature, fan speeds, CPU/memory state, disks, firmware, addon cards, the works. You can monitor it all from wherever you like. Have it fire off alters if something goes wrong, get reports on what is and is not up to date, all that shit.
It is amazing how efficient it can make managing things. There is rarely a need to go fiddle around in the server room. Also, with Windows at least, you can have fully automatic patching, or centrally controlled patching. So you don't have to go system to system ordering patches, they can do it themselves or you can use a central console to clear patches to servers (virtual and physical) as you see fit.
If you want to use Mac Minis, ok no problem, but I think you'd find that if you stepped up your system administration game and got some real server hardware/software, it would take was less time for setup and maintenance. When I want to stand up a new virtual server at work it takes just a couple minutes of time, from wherever I am, to get it started. Then the install is largely automated by images I've configured for Windows, or puppet for Linux. The install is fast too, because it is all going from disks.
For that matter, if I have a server that is a prototype for what I want, I just clone it, and then stand that up. VMs are literally as easy as clicking "clone" to make a copy of.
It is $1000. That's the thing here. They aren't all that powerful and they cost a grand. So you can pack 8 of them in to a 5RU shelf, apparently. Ok, that's $8k, presuming no upgrades... Well go have a look at what you get from Dell for $8k. You can get quite a bit of server, including things like ECC RAM and hot swap disks and all that.
I can understand getting a single cheap computer as a server if your needs are low, and thus you aren't going to spend a ton. But when you are talking about tossing a ton of them in a rack, well you have to evaluate what they'd be competing against.
"More than half dozen". So more than six and less than twelve facilities use these and it makes news? Then a few sentences later I read that "some of them even run windows". More wtfness going on. So someone is buying over priced hardware to run retail (because Apple doesn't have an OEM agreement) copies of Windows. That's a winning business plan right there.
They do whatever they feel is right, and will change direction totally at the drop of a hat. Now in the consumer market, seems to have worked rather well. They've made a shit ton of money. However it means for enterprise that you need to beware. Support can end at any time, products can go away at nay time, etc. It's one of the reasons I'm very anti-Mac in the enterprise because you can't build a support strategy around it because you don't know what will happen. You can have a solution and then have it disappear.
For a cellphone, no big deal. For a server, it is a real issue.
Using JAMF Casper - running on Linux on HP Server hardware.
No need for Apple servers anymore :).
A toy database can run on a toy. A large database (where large is relative) and/or one with a lot of concurrent users hits the problems you list above.
It is the only mac on your wish list that you can actually get.
That a system hasn't failed doesn't mean it can't. If you take a data point of one and believe that's valid, well then you fail at the science and the statistics.
With anything, computers included, the question is NOT if they'll fail, it is when. That system WILL fail. Might be tomorrow, might be 20 years from now. The problem is you don't know when it'll happen. Then suddenly the TCO goes from the cost of the system, up to whatever lost business there is, maybe it costs your job.
Redundancy, backups, etc are things you have not because you think you'll need them, but because you'll be glad you have them if you do. We have experienced very, very few failures in our critical servers. The hardware is solid. However, we have things set up so that we have excess capacity to deal with it. The reason is not because it happens all the time, but because if it does happen, we want to be ready. Same reason we back up to tape, and rotate them out to another building and shit like that.
We've systems older than 8 years still operational. Our pay to print terminals are like 10 years old or more. They are lab systems for a number of incarnations ago. Reason is it is a very easy thing to do, downtime is no biggie, and not time critical, so we throw whatever old junk there as the station. However that those particular ones are still running doesn't mean they'll run forever or that all systems like them will. We've had a number fail and had to get rid of them.
So sorry, but indeed Mac Minis DO die. Yours will, at some point, and you'd better have a recovery plan, otherwise people may be rather displeased with you.
For data centers, it is still all about VGA. The reason is KVM systems use it. Even the big network KVMs are generally VGA at heart. The standard in servers is VGA, with one on the back, and one on the front. The back one for wiring to a KVM, the front on for hooking up to a crash cart.
Now this may not sound like a big deal but when you've managed a number of servers it quickly becomes apparent why such a thing can matter. Can Minis do VGA? Well of course, but as you noted you'll need a host of adapters. Then, of course, if there's an issue you get to wonder if it is the system or the adapter, and so on.
There's a lot done in the server world with regards to standards that is the though for not when things go right but when they go wrong. If you've never experienced the problems then you might not appreciate why but if you have, it becomes rather clear.
No. If you want your own personal copy of wordpress running on OSX, do that. Install XAMPP, wordpress, source control. It takes all of ten minutes -- less if you script it.
You do not need a publicly-accessible server to do development on. You sure as shit don't need colo.
The argument that people should use what they're comfortable with is nice, but not part of an enterprise server solution. Let's take an analogy here: I am a pretty decent cook. Given sufficient time and a minimum of kitchen gear, I can produce a tasty dish (or two or three). I am completely unqualified to be in a restaurant kitchen. I don't even know what I don't know about that profession.
You say you have a tasty recipe that you've whipped up with your Mac. You tell me that you want me and (24 x 5U) of my friends to make this recipe for all your internet customers. This will work, to a degree, but is unlikely to scale very well. Also, even though your home-cooked meal is tasty and does the same thing as that restaurant meal, you and that restaurant chef are not actually in the same business. In order to become a part of that business, you need to [a] study more, and [b] use the same professional tools that everyone else uses. Sometimes the only reason things are widely used is because they're widely used, but more often there's a reason that impacts the quality of the product.
It's fine to not be in the professional cooking business. But saying "I don't need a professional kitchen/chef" based on this experience is foolhardy. You don't know what you don't know.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
They were trying to insist we use their preferred tool, rather than the one we know how to use.
You are pretty typical for a web developer who has no experience in a managed environment. You think that you are a special snowflake and that you should have what you want. Doesn't work that way.
One-off solutions are a big problem, they are what ends up taking lots of time, lots of resources, lots of support. They are the 5% that takes 95% of time. That's fine if you want a bigass IT group, but if you want just a few people, well then things have to be streamlined.
So let's ask what's more reasonable: That an IT group either trains or hires someone on Mac administration, purchases Mac hardware, and associated software to make it integrate with other systems, and so on for one website, or that the web developers write their code for the web platform that all the other stuff runs on?
Sorry, you are still in a niche. Outside of networking people hear of "the cloud" but don't have not heard of virtual hosts, zones or full on virtual machines. Since Apple abandoned server space why do they think they are going to care about a niche in server space no matter how big a chunk of server space it is?
I'm in that little corner you are calling the "real world" as well, so I'm not putting you down for your choice of words. I also don't agree with what Apple are doing but I can understand why - they can't get that same lock-in they value for the long term.
Any one remember Cobolt before the product was ruined by Sun? I can't understand why there was never a phoenix for the Cobolt products, they were everywhere, if they had been still around no body would buy Mac Minis for this purpose.
For your Mac Mini Server running as a Desktop, try using iStat Menus with the (sensors) fan profile set to Max. Mine runs nicely around 42 degrees, a little higher under load.
http://bjango.com (iStat Menus)
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
This is not a matter of preference as in: dev likes yellow cars, I like green cars, we get green cars.
It's a matter of preference as in: dev likes wankel engine, I like diesel engine, dev can't repair the engine if it malfunctions, the kind of job is suited for diesel engines and in the future dev will likely have to drive diesel anyway.
Ignoring the dev is the right thing to do.
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The question is what does the colo company do when they have a problem. So your little mini dies, how long does it take them to get it fixed? Can they recover your data? How long does that take? If you care about the availability of your server, then how your colo company deals with shit is very much your concern.
Also I'm thinking from the perspective of someone who would run something like a colo. I am thinking of what their DR plan is, what they do when things break. Some of them may not have thought this through and may be in for a bad time when problems happen.
Particularly not to satisfy a prima-donna mobile developer who thinks that everyone should do things his way because he's so smart. Extra particularly since you aren't someone I have to support. I'll keep doing things the way the university wants me to, the way they pay me to, you can do whatever makes you happy. I will, however, comment on Slashdot when I see something of interest to me and relevant to my experience. Given that I do run a data center, I just might know a little about the issues one faces.
This is not a matter of preference as in: dev likes yellow cars, I like green cars, we get green cars.
It's a matter of preference as in: dev likes wankel engine, I like diesel engine, dev can't repair the engine if it malfunctions, the kind of job is suited for diesel engines and in the future dev will likely have to drive diesel anyway.
Ignoring the dev is the right thing to do.
And another sysadmin demonstrates that he only knows and cares for the problems he has. He takes no allowance of the pros and cons of the different platforms for the developer.
He forgets that he's there to serve the company, not the other way around.
Oh so I would be HELPING by keeping a dev into his own distortion bubble? and I would HELP the company by introducing it to a distortion bubble?
We are not discussing a switch to openbsd. I'd help the dev if he wanted that. We are discussing a switch to a single vendor system from a commodity system. Introducing a dependency. And you dare bringing the good of the company to the table...
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