Apple is to discontinue Xserve

[FN-GM]

Apple signs Xserve death warrant ? reghardware

[tech_guy]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....!

[localzuk]

So they intend to kill off any possibility of working in the corporate environment. Seems fair enough, they are definitely geared towards consumers and small businesses anyway.

[Dos_Box]

Intersting. I've been having some chats in the background with various companies, and some intreting titbots come to light.

 

1. Apple use Windows servers internally. And why not. Apple themselves don't acutually have any industry level server based apps such as Exchange and SQL.

2. Steve Jobs has indicated that Apple must look and support the corporate market place, one that is heavily dominated by Microsoft.

3. To supply smaller and cheaper 'bridging' products such as the MacMini running OSX server so as to allow AD integration makes more finacial sense than trying to reinvent the wheel.

 

Intersting things are happing at Apple, things that are going to start to impact on most of us in the next 24 months.

[dayzd]

Interesting indeed. Annoying too, as we've just set up our Mac-only, XServe-hosted OD network this September - we were AD integrated last year, but had issues we couldn't overcome so everything got reconfigured!

 

So long as it isn't the end of the road for OS X Server, most of us will live and I can understand why they're doing it. Mobile platforms with app-stores seem to be Apple's raison d'être just no, and as Dos_Box said, they don't need to re-invent the wheel with server technologies, just integrate themselves into what is already hugely widespread.

 

I coveted the XServe for years before we got one here (like a good little nerd should). Little bit sad they're to be discontinued!

[FN-GM]

So long as it isn't the end of the road for OS X Server

 

Its just the Xserve hardware they are stopping. The OS X server software will still be arround

[ZeroHour]

Its just the Xserve hardware they are stopping. The OS X server software will still be arround

 

The hardware is the point though, the point of buying servers rather then desktops to run server tasks is the hardware is ALWAYS of a much higher quality and better tested for mean time to failure. Its really stupid depending on desktop grade kit to run critical systems and likewise its stupid putting server grade kit into desktops.

Really silly move and no one has the option to put osx server on their own hardware... fail apple, fail....

And Wosnic said their enterprise support was going to get better....

[Dos_Box]

The hardware is the point though, the point of buying servers rather then desktops to run server tasks is the hardware is ALWAYS of a much higher quality and better tested for mean time to failure. Its really stupid depending on desktop grade kit to run critical systems and likewise its stupid putting server grade kit into desktops.

Really silly move and no one has the option to put osx server on their own hardware... fail apple, fail....

And Wosnic said their enterprise support was going to get better....

 

Perhaps, but simply concentrating on 'bridging' means they don't have to be accountable for storage platforms, merely the access to them, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than making servers (admittedly, very nice servers) and providing the kind of support they require. I suspect that if Apple were to try and push the Xserv in the marketlace then their reseller support model would fail and they would have to spend $$$$$ on supporting their own products. This way they get to creep into the enterprise marketspace and perhaps in a few years time may come out with some other, more beefier products to 'support' Apple platforms and devices then well entrenched in the enterprise.

Also there is the fact that they proberbly didn't make that much money off the XServer in proportion to the effort that went into design, production and support compared to the other tier one server manufacturers.

[mattx]

Intersting. I've been having some chats in the background with various companies, and some intreting titbots come to light.

 

1. Apple use Windows servers internally. And why not. Apple themselves don't acutually have any industry level server based apps such as Exchange and SQL.

2. Steve Jobs has indicated that Apple must look and support the corporate market place, one that is heavily dominated by Microsoft.

3. To supply smaller and cheaper 'bridging' products such as the MacMini running OSX server so as to allow AD integration makes more finacial sense than trying to reinvent the wheel.

 

Intersting things are happing at Apple, things that are going to start to impact on most of us in the next 24 months.

 

There is nothing interesting going on at Apple apart from ripping people off with their over priced krap products.

[localzuk]

The hardware is the point though, the point of buying servers rather then desktops to run server tasks is the hardware is ALWAYS of a much higher quality and better tested for mean time to failure. Its really stupid depending on desktop grade kit to run critical systems and likewise its stupid putting server grade kit into desktops.

Really silly move and no one has the option to put osx server on their own hardware... fail apple, fail....

And Wosnic said their enterprise support was going to get better....

 

Oh I don't know about some of that. Every big computer company makes desktops with server grade hardware in the form of 'workstations'. The Mac Pro is a workstation device, and not really a 'desktop' device - that is the iMac and the Mac Mini's realm.

[torledo]

what will that do for second hand prices of xserves then.

[ZeroHour]

Oh I don't know about some of that. Every big computer company makes desktops with server grade hardware in the form of 'workstations'. The Mac Pro is a workstation device, and not really a 'desktop' device - that is the iMac and the Mac Mini's realm.

 

Come on, its not exactly enterprise. I wouldnt use a workstation as a critical server either and thats before we get to mounting it.

The prices are laughable as well when compared between an xserver and mac pro.... where are the mac pro SAS drives for example?

Also who needs a beefy graphics card in a server... its just a waste of money/power/heat having that in a server.

Multiple power supplies, nope, multiple nics, nope... multiple FC cards, nope, I cant believe you would think a pro is even close to what you would want in a datacenter.... this is before you get to support such as OS support etc.

 

EDIT: looking at the xserve its not that great an enterprise server either with its limited options, it really needed a bump up.

Edited November 5, 2010 by ZeroHour

[free870]

Well they could make the mac server support windows 7 clients when its being used a DC and provide some group policy alternative. Maybe a proper helpdesk support system with tickets on apple support section of there website. Unless apple are gonna make some cloud based server system.

[psydii]

Hmm, a mac pro works well on its side, and shelves in racks rather than rails has always been viable.

 

So a couple of mac pros with Parallels® Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition and shared storage (FC/iscsi SAN) would run a school network pretty sweetly.

 

The market for Mac Pros and XServes have been canabalised by the macmini Server and the power of the core2/i5-7 in the imacs.

Given an existing virtualised Windows Server environment then a macmini server is more than adequet for suppoting 200 imacs, the xserve has been a deadman walking for a couple of years, hopefully the expladability of the macpro will protect it.

 

 

However given apple's recent 'its all about mobile consumer electronics' and rumours about depopulating the ProApps team, and the lack of real development with ARD, I can't say things are looking good. I'd have to question the wisdom of investing in macs within education at this point - if apple abandon the 'Industry' that made them hip then they loose their relevance to schools trying to expose students to the real-world tools that can make them stand out from the next job seeker.

[Soulfish]

What they really need is to team up with HP/Dell/IBM and support running OSX Server on specific versions/configurations of enterprise level servers. If I can't rack mount it then it's not going to be run as a server. If we can't run OS X server then we're certainly not going to be running macs.

 

To me this stinks of Apple sticking two fingers up at the enterprise market and rather than embracing how it works, going "we know better than you, so you'll be doing as we say".

[Dos_Box]

Some revealing info from The Register here. Seems that Apple didn't want too upgrade to the latest Intel processors for some reason.

 

This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect. The handwriting was on the wall earlier this year when Apple didn't refresh its two-socket, rack-mounted server with Intel's latest six-core "Westmere-EP" Xeon 5600 processors — something that was, from an engineering point of view, relatively easy to do.

 

That's because the Xeon 5600s are socket-compatible with the quad-core Xeon 5500s that were announced in early April 2009, only a few days after Intel pushed out these "Nehalem-EP" server and workstation chips into the gaping maw of the Great Recession and defied it.

 

The Xeon 5500s offered a huge performance boost for many workloads compared to previous Xeon 5300 and 5400 processors, mainly due to the switch from the frontside bus architecture to the QuickPath Interconnect point-to-point interconnect used with current Xeon servers. The Xeon 5600 rev happened a year later, and most cases, all server makers had to do to refresh their lines was to certify the new chip, add support for fatter 8 GB and 16 GB DDR3 memory sticks as well as low-voltage 8 GB parts, maybe put in a higher-efficiency power supply, and cram in a few more disk drives in a clever way in their 1U, 2U, and 4U rack form factors and tower equivalents.

 

It is the height of laziness and selfishness that Apple has not long-since done this, and it is a disservice to Xserve customers that Apple is not revving the Xserves with Xeon 5600s, fatter memory, and faster and more capacious disks as it begins winding down the Xserve product line. Apple could also have given customers just a little bit more warning.

 

The rest of the article can be found here:

 

Steve Jobs chucks Apple server biz from pram ? The Register

[tb2571989]

Saw this on the Register earlier...guess what we have for our macs?

 

Which is a shame, because our xServe is deafinately one of our nicest looking servers. Oh so shiny.

[dayzd]

Reading the Register article from above, it seems clear to me that Apple simply weren't making enough money through the XServes.

It's disappointing and will definitely leave a lot of people in a sticky situation when something goes wrong - the limited availability of new drives certainly worries me. That said, we should be fine with ours. It's fairly new, pretty well spec'ed and connected to our EMC SAN for storage. So long as we buy in a couple of spares in the next 12 months in case the system drive(s) go...

[localzuk]

Reading the Register article from above, it seems clear to me that Apple simply weren't making enough money through the XServes.

It's disappointing and will definitely leave a lot of people in a sticky situation when something goes wrong - the limited availability of new drives certainly worries me. That said, we should be fine with ours. It's fairly new, pretty well spec'ed and connected to our EMC SAN for storage. So long as we buy in a couple of spares in the next 12 months in case the system drive(s) go...

 

The drives inside the caddies aren't anything special usually, so it shouldn't be a massive issue if one dies - just buy another with the same spec from a standard PC hardware seller and replace the one in the caddy.

[dayzd]

Cool.

Where's my thanks button gone?!

[localzuk]

Cool.

Where's my thanks button gone?!

 

Don't think there is one in the news section. There's the 'Reputation' button though (the star).

[dayzd]

Ah yeah - didn't think what section we were in!

Thanks for pointing that out