Apple to abandon their XServe line | Hacker News Reader

Apple to abandon their XServe line

apple.com

59 pointsdrgvond37 comments

I always thought it was awesome that they carried the attention to design over to their server line, but this move honestly makes a lot of sense. Enterprise server solutions isn't really their game.

Other than administering client macs, there really wasn't any benefit to running a cluster of mac servers. Apple's game has always been getting the difficulty threshold low enough that mom and pop can do whizzy things. In terms of servers, anybody running that type of hardware will probably have the expertise to do it from scratch, cobble together a solution, or outsource it to a contractor.

While there could be something in enterprise iPhone management, I think they play well enough with exchange's provisioning.

> Other than administering client macs, there really wasn't any benefit to running a cluster of mac servers.

Bingo. Apple's server offering have always been (and will continue to be) expected to support a whole network of apple hardware. In that situation, xserves don't really make sense anymore, they're fairly crappy general-purpose servers and you don't need an xserve to support an OSX-based network and OSX's group utilities. The Mini Server is much smaller for minor networks, and the base Mac Pro Server offering is the same price as the entry-price Xserve, not really rackable but with far superior hardware: 2.26 quad, 3GB RAM and 160GB HDD for the Xserve, 2.8 quad, 8GB RAM and 2x1TB HDD for the Mac Pro.

Plus the Mac Pro

* comes with a GPU if you want a render farm

* scales to more memory (up to 32GB versus 24 for the Xserve, and bumping the Mac Pro to 24GB is $450 cheaper than the Xserve)

* scales to much bigger CPUs (you can get a better CPU on the Xserve by switching to the $3600 model, which starts with 2x2.26GHz quads and can get up to 2x2.93 quads, but the mac pro can still be upgraded to 2x2.93 hexas)

> Apple's game has always been getting the difficulty threshold low enough that mom and pop can do whizzy things.

So that anyone can do wizzy things.

Which of the remaining Apple machines take ECC memory? You really should not be running a serious server without ECC, which allows the hardware to detect and often correct transient errors caused by e.g. background radiation.

The Mac Pro uses ECC RAM (http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html), the Mac Mini doesn't and can't since it has a Core 2 chip and Intel only supports ECC w/ its Xeon chips.

I wonder what kind of machines they are using in their giant new data center.

Ugly ones. Steve Jobs has to wear blinkers while touring the aisles.

Does anybody know the answer to this? I too am quite curious.

Not sure how accurate this picture is, but I see xserve's and sun servers there: http://www.cultofmac.com/interview-apples-gigantic-new-data-...

That's of SystemX a Virginia Tech cluster dating back to 2003, not of Apple's data center: http://www.arc.vt.edu/arc/SystemX/

Apple mostly uses Sun machines. I was surprised to learn this, but they tend towards a conservative, heavyweight server infrastructure.

Where does this leave Mac OS X Server now? Is it dead? Will they continue to develop it and for what purpose?

The only product that is currently using it is the Mac Mini Server as far as I know.

And the just-announced Mac Pro Server: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pr...

OS X Server is just OS X with some additional services and admin tools, and probably less effort to maintain than a whole different hardware form. Given that the Mac Pro Server was only just announced, it looks like that's the tactical fix to fill the gap in the lineup left by the X-Serve.

After the X-Raid line's name was already passed onto a third party (Promise) this isn't really surprising.

You could always buy it separately, $499 for unlimited clients.

There's now a "Mac Pro Server" option available, which includes OS X Server, but is priced a bit lower than if you take the base Mac Pro and configure it with the same hardware but without OS X Server.

(Take the base Mac Pro, raise the RAM from 3GB to 8, add a second 1TB hard drive, and you've got the same hardware config as the Mac Pro Server, for about $30 more, and without OS X Server, which would add another $499 to the price.)

Virtualization probably. Apple already allows OSX Server to run virtualized with the caveat that the VM must be hosted on a machine built by Apple. They'll probably just drop that restriction so you can run an OSX Server on Hyper-V or VMWare on generic hardware. It will probably be a good thing for OSX Server.

It's always been challenging for me to administer a server running any Mac Server products. They've made so many tweaks to do things slightly different that everywhere else, it became quite difficult to troubleshoot.

I concur!

Ran a couple of Xserves a while ago to run web application stacks on it and most of the time I diverged from using the GUI to administer things I shot myself in the foot (Apache, firewalls, initscripts, networking etc.).

The nice hardware - those CPU load meters were gorgeous - unfortunately doesn't make up for those problems so I switched back to non Apple hardware + Linux and never looked back.

Don't fight the system is a nice mantra to follow when using Mac OS X Server and that's not hard when you use it to administer a collection of other Macs & the network they're on or when using the built-in services without wanting to tweak/upgrade the versions yourself (iCal server, Mail server etc.).

> most of the time I diverged from using the GUI to administer things I shot myself in the foot

This is something you hopefully learned early or were told by an more experienced Mac admin— configuring, let alone automating, Xserves from a CLI is an exercise in futility as so many components system have been rewritten to do things "the Apple Way."

Learned that soon enough, only 2 Xserves were used and the rest of the rack quickly went back to Linux ;-) Although those puppies are still up-and-running of course (my Xserve adventure was in 2003)

I had to administer 2 Mac OS X servers remotely via CLI on many occasions. It was a frustrating exercise each time. I found it easy to forget the commands and flags to do things with their built in tools. They were much too verbose when compared to the tools one would be used to in Linux to do the same thing.

Now that they have killed Xserve, where does that leave Mac OS X Server? Is it dead? Will they continue to develop it and for what purpose?

I was quite excited about the Mac Mini Server. The thought of picking up a box for my home that I could use for just about everything and integrates so well with all my existing hardware and software (Macbook Pro, iMac, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, etc) sounded awesome! And was so quiet, small, and even attractive enough to just throw under the TV to use as a media hub.

Reading between the lines, does this mean XSan is dying? It's software, but like the XServe, it's a high level enterprise offering. Samba does a fine job for low-end stuff, but XSan is still needed for high-end, high-bandwidth applications.

xsan has always just been a rebranded san offering from quantum. It could go away, but then you just buy quantums' thingy.

Xsan uses Quantum's Stornext, but last I checked (admittedly a while ago), XSan is the OS X client, so without Xsan, there is no OS X Stornext Client. (I'd love to be proven wrong on this though.)

It was never high-level enterprise offering. The part that Apple never figured out was the support side of things.

They priced their hardware competitively, and it was good hardware, but in all of their price comparisons they ignored the reality of what the competition was offering in order to make it appear that Apple was offering the better value, which it was not.

For example on the Big Mac that they deployed to VA tech, they sold the university the computers, and compared that price to Dell's. Dell's price however included the computers, network hardware, network installation, building lease, power infrastructure buildout, on-site support, and upgrades.

That's the real reason that Apple hasn't made significant headway into corporate markets; it's not a technical limitation on the hardware or software, it's been support.

IT groups I've spoken to found Apple support to be pretty frustrating to work with, because they had no idea as to how to handle support calls involving non-trivial numbers of machines. (They were fine with a single machine at a time per customer, but when you tell them "here are the 40 serial numbers for computers that you've recalled for a replacement battery" they fell flat on their face.)

Abandon is too strong a word for the link given. Yes they are discontinuing it for new sales but they will still support existing customers.

Sorry, my mother tongue is responsible for that. Or you can always argue that, eventually, they will abandon them.

Do you mind if I ask whether you changed the title? My memory has the original title as "Apple abandons their XServe line".

I didn't. But then, as someone said on another post, there are at least 3 posts for this announce.

Thanks, I appreciate the reply.

It also looks like they plan to continue developing OS X Server. Plus, they still have a hardware server offering in the Mac Mini Server.

> Plus, they still have a hardware server offering in the Mac Mini Server.

And the Mac Pro Server.

Lion Server? Has there even been talk of it? Dead now?

I'd imagine the only use case for server that couldn't be done easily in a better way was spotlight server, and it's only a matter of doing it more cheaply than available CMS solutions.

The only public talk about Lion has been entirely consumer focused. They haven't delved into anything technical or server-oriented.

I'd assume they're doing stuff in those areas, they just haven't done any PR.

My question is, what will Apple use internally for their server needs? I assume at least a part of their servers are running Mac OS X Server.

Apple mostly uses Sun Servers.

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