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Mac Pro Colocation

macprocolo.net

10 pointsjohnatwork10 comments

I'd be curious to see how they're dealing with rack mounting these. I have a vision that looks like a wine rack.....

Not to mention rack mounting in a way that protects the enclosure from scratches from both rack vibration and when working on or adding/removing neighbouring units.

Scratches? Seriously? It's in a data center. Who cares?

Besides, the enclosure is there to take scuffs in place of the computer's internals. That's protection enough for people who use these services.

As for vibration, SSDs and the lack of CDROM drives mean that these things have no moving parts to be disturbed.

> Scratches? Seriously? It's in a data center. Who cares?

Seriously.

You're talking about people who are specifically buying Mac Pros. You're talking about a product heavily marketed based on aesthetic. If you don't care about the Mac Pro and are buying purely based on performance, why limit yourself to the Mac Pro when you can purchase a rack mountable unit customized to your preferences without paying a huge premium for the hardware?

Just because the unit is in a data centre doesn't mean that the owner doesn't want it treated with care, nor does it mean that they won't want it back in their personal possession -- scratch free.

Because it runs OS X, and you can't run OS X on a rack mountable unit.

I've never understood the point of such services (i know there is somehing similar for raspi as well) - why is this better than using any Iaas / Paas provider ?

I'm wondering about the merits though. Does the Mac pro really pack so much more power per m^3 so as to justify not to use regular pizza boxes?

I guess there must be a certain market of clients asking for powerful 24/7 mac's...thinking buildhosts or something like that.

Doubtful, you can only only fit 3 across in 5U of rackspace - I don’t think even the most heavily spec’ed Mac Pro(s) would compete on a “CPU per m^3” basis - you could put a PowerEdge R910 in with 4 Xeon E7-4870s and 2TB of RAM.

Like you said, specialized build machines are really the only feasible hosting option I can think of.

Is it standard practice to ask for credit card info on a regular http site? I thought that sort of thing was usually done on an https page.

yes. form is submitted via HTTPS:

    <form method="post" action="https://www.formstack.com/forms/index.php" ...>

standard, yes. best? probably not, as most users aren't aware that it's submitted over HTTPS until after submission.

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