MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation | Hacker News Reader

MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

macstadium.com

26 pointsbane45 comments

I will offer my translation services for their marketing copy:

"Meticulously engineered and constructed to facilitate 270 Mac Pro servers per POD while occupying only 12 square feet of datacenter floor space. "

means

"we have a cage in a datacenter with hot and cold aisles, and we bought off the shelf commercial racking and figured out how many we can fit in that racking"

"a pressurized environment allowing the Mac Pro servers to effortlessly draw in conditioned air from the central chamber, and expel it thru its unified thermal core. "

means

"the datacenter, as usual, has hot and cold aisles, so we will orient the Macs so they draw in chilled air from the big Lieberts and expel the heated air into the hot aisle; we will use blanking panels, custom cut styrofoam, or other materials to keep hot air from backwashing into the cold air aisle"

"Each server is provided redundant power, cooling, and a full Gigabit of Internet connectivity, all backed by live 24x7 support ensuring 100% uptime "

means

"we are relying on the datacenter's existing usual, typical power and cooling infrastructure, which is redundant of course; and, we will install 1 or more gigabit drops, with gigabit switches for each Mac to plug into"

(all pretty standard stuff in any DC)

"and the datacenter has remote hands capability, which we will use if needed" . Since we don't know exactly the nature of their 24x7 support, we don't know anything more.

100% uptime means only "in months that there isn't 100% uptime, you will get a credit on your bill". Check for exclusions they give themselves for maintenance windows.

"ensuring 100% uptime" without an asterisk pointing to a 300-page list of exceptions is obviously hiding it deep in the T&Cs when signing up.

The amusing part is that this sort of assurance has exactly the value you mentioned. You may be running your $20m business on this $50 service (Elvis help you), but if you're down for a month, the maximum you're going to get back is $50, and very likely only in the form of a service credit.

I'm not sure if you looked at the other pages, because OMFG WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE GODADDY STYLE IMAGERY, but you'll note they're using EMC "Clarion" SAN devices.

What a waste of a Mac. I'm all for the novelty of doing something neat with Apple hardware (System X, macminicolo), but this machine isn't suited for headless closet-sitting. It's meant to be on a desk in Pixar, NBC or another live video venue, rendering things in real time and lighting up 4K displays.

Someone probably discovered that it's cost-effective due to heat and power efficiency.

It might make more sense than you think. Maybe.

It depends on the application, but the 2 vast graphics cards that make up a sizable part of the Pro's power draw will go to waste completely in a typical server application. The setup could be interesting for compute tasks or specialized render farms, but then again similar performance could be had with much cheaper components.

I don't think there are lots of applications where the use of a Mac is actually a financially sound decision in this scenario.

I agree with this. There aren't enough applications yet that even touch what the Mac Pro can do, and when they do exist, limiting them by network bandwidth through colocation seems like a dumb move. Give me a farm of Mac Minis any day.

A desktop system with a novel thermal design is being packed in tightly in a way that the manufacturer probably hasn't tested, and in a way that's going to be hard to diagnose or fix? He who dares I guess :)

What do people use hosted Macs for anyway? I guess there must be some niches, but surely everything that's great about a Mac is optimised for local usage?

OSX can only be run on Mac hardware. If you want virtual Macs within the EULA, this is what you must do. This would be attractive for people wanting to to build testing on mac machines, for example.

> OSX can only be run on Mac hardware.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/

If you are an enterprise you would not be using modified kernels with the copy protection neutered in production.

Sir or madam, I've seen this done in production environments costing tens of millions of dollars.

If you are an enterprise, you will not be running MacOSX on a server at all.

If you want to do continuous integration on a Mac or iPhone/iPad/iPod application and still be compliant with Apple's license, that's pretty much the only way to go.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but that would be more a development environment than a traditional server. That it would be used for developing client side applications would reinforce such a distinction.

Yes and no. It's a development environment because most of the development tools have to be there. It's a server because the CI machine should be running at all times and, ideally, should not have a user sitting in front of it bothering it with tasks such as browsing HN.

Running at all times does not equate to being a server. Nor does being headless. The important point is for it to serve clients. In this case, it could at most tenuously be a server in the sense that it would be listening to have code uploaded to it. That would more be a secondary function for the convenience of getting code onto it though, as that portion would not require being on MacOSX. It's the desktop functions that require MacOSX.

In any event, that's still a far cry from being an enterprise server. Generally, it should serve the needs of the entire enterprise and not just a single department. There should also be full vendor support for the complete solution, and a high level of fault tolerance to really be enterprise.

Two quick technical points:

1) OS X itself does not utilize any copy protection. There are no serial numbers, call-home activations, etc.

2) You can run OS X without any modified kernels or kexts with the right mix of hardware.

There is actually. Look for the following kernel extension.

   Don't Steal MacOSX.kext

(Name might be wrong, but it's certainly there)

I think if you're planning on running a business of OSX machines, you probably shouldn't rely on hackintosh stuff. Upgrading the OS on hackintosh is pretty painful.

> I think if you're planning on running a business... upgrading the OS... is pretty painful.

This is by no means specific to OSX.

Don't confuse what he said.

Upgrading a hacked copy of OS X running on hardware it was never designed to run on is pretty painful.

Upgrading OSX on Apple hardware is a breeze.

Point releases updates on real hardware is so easy. My Hackintosh scares me to even update Safari and the self-updater has managed to brick the computer with just security updates (really stable when not updating tho :)

> If you want virtual Macs within the EULA

EULA definitely doesn't allow Hackintoshes. Some workplaces are ok with this, some definitely are not.

Thinking about it, I am thinking commoditization of the entire device is flawed while commoditization of parts is not.

x86 Chromebooks uses different firmware too, which is sad because those UEFI bugs that affect Linux would be easier to fix if they didn't.

There are a few uses - mostly related to OSX anyways though. A buttload of Macs is very useful for automated testing of OSX or iOS apps, for example.

That said, the bottleneck for this type of usage isn't performance - you'd have to wait 200ms between taps anyways, so why bother with a fast machine?

I'm having trouble seeing any use for this sort of thing. The main uses for hosted Macs are very, very well covered by a boatload of Mac Minis - they're a lot more cost effective also.

Apple say no problem: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6099?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...

>A desktop system with a novel thermal design is being packed in tightly in a way that the manufacturer probably hasn't tested, and in a way that's going to be hard to diagnose or fix?

I don't see anything that's "going to be hard to diagnose or fix".

I'm leasing a server from MacStadium that's used for iOS continuous integration. I could also see MacStadium being useful for someone learning iOS development who isn't ready to splurge on a new Mac.

From the OS X Mavericks license:

The grant set forth in Section 2B(iii) above does not permit you to use the virtualized copies or instances of the Apple Software in connection with service bureau, time-sharing, terminal sharing or other similar types of services.

and

Except as expressly permitted in this Section 2G, or except as otherwise licensed by Apple, you agree not to use the Apple Software, or any of its functionality, in connection with service bureau, time-sharing, terminal sharing or other similar types of services, whether such services are being provided within your own organization or to third parties.

where the quoted section allows remote access by a single device, remote viewing by a "reasonable number" of devices, and remote access to a separate desktop session by a single Apple-branded device.

So buying/leasing a hosted Mac for development is fine, but renting remote access to a shared Mac for development is right out unless only one person (or two, with the second connecting only from Apple-branded devices) is using it at a time and virtualization is not used.

Sure, why not iPhone colocation too?

This seems like buying a Ferrari for your mailman. Well, except the difference is you'd actually get to see the Ferrari once a day.

Is this purely a marketing ploy? Surely blades are much, much better suited for this...

Show me a blade that I can legally run OS X on.

I thought you could legally run OS X on VMWare - am I mistaken?

You can (per the EULA [1]) virtualise OS X on Apple hardware. VMware can run on Apple hardware.

    run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple 
    Software within virtual operating system environments on each
    Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the
    Apple Software

[1] http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX109.pdf

Thanks, I didn't know you couldn't legally visualize OS X on non-Apple hardware.

That's gotta be hurting them now they have no xServe

You can't. The terms quoted above specifically restrict it to virtualizing Mac OS X on Apple hardware.

Like this? http://i.imgur.com/GXpLIYm.jpg

Oddly enough, back when the cylindrical Mac Pro was first announced, a coworker and I discussed how exactly one would rack them. We came up with something very similar, but slightly asymmetric, and designed to hook into a standard 19" rack.

(This was prompted by the question of what Apple's Web site runs on if they don't make servers any more.)

100% uptime?

I'm sold based on this alone!

Is it becoming tradition now to do something like this every time a new Mac Pro is released?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(computing)

You know what's relevant to cloud hosting? Women in short shorts and cleavage.

http://www.macstadium.com/solutions

#sexismintech =(

Is this a joke? I guess if you have money to burn.

Thought that was the stack overflow log for a second had to do a double take.

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