Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Xserve Discontinued!

I think recently you must have heard that Apple is discontinuing the XServe. That would mean the end of rack mountable servers for Apple. Instead, people will be able to purchase Mac OS Server on the Mac Pro machines or Mac Mini.

I guess this means that Apple has finally decided to leave the corporate world. Although it is still possible that certain organisations will deploy Mac Pro workstations running Mac OS Server, it's not the norm among big enterprises. Apple may be of course making a statement that Mac OS Server does not require expensive servers in order to run, but the fact is that rack-mountable servers for some organisations is a requirement. It is however possible to put the Mac mini on a shelf in the rack but we all know how powerful a mac mini is.

The location of the servers are also important. In an enterprise context, servers are usually not easily accessible by users and most of the time, they are at most only accessed remotely. Putting the Mac Pro workstation in the data centre will only waste valuable rack space, which may increase the data centre power usage. Servers are also usually put on a different network and some are not directly accessible by users. Putting the server outside of a data centre will defeat that purpose since the server can always be accessed physically by anyone.

Therefore, the only use of Mac OS Server will be for small enterprises that do not have a "data centre" so as to speak. However, the problem I always find with Macs is the patch management. I always do not understand why each patch that is released by Apple is in 100s of MBs. Just imagine 10 users downloading the patch at the same time. Your network will be a gonner. I believe though that you can do some limited form of patch management for the iOS since it's controlled by iTunes (e.g. Multiple devices using a same machine for syncing and patching).

Anyway, my conclusion is that the Mac is built for consumers and consumers only. Pity.

No comments:

Visit Rhinestic's Knick Knacks @ Etsy for handmade goods and supplies!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...