
Among Servers, Apple’s Mac Mini Quietly Gains Ground - kristianp
http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/among-servers-apples-mac-mini-quietly-gains-ground/
======
alrs
I remember reading articles like this about technologies and companies that I
was excited about.

In the late 80s the stories were: "The Apple // is still relevant." It wasn't.
I remember OS/2 fans pointing to "huge deployments in banking", "huge in
Brazil", and "every ATM machine is running OS/2." Whatever truth was there was
irrelevant, as IBM had given up on OS/2.

Apple has given up on selling a server operating system. Apple has given up on
selling server hardware. Apple failed.

A cluster of minis makes sense if you are running a CI build farm for an OS X
application. It probably makes sense if you're building a FCP render farm. In
both of these cases, note that it only makes sense because of the licensing
issues. In a saner world you would be running on commodity x86 hardware.

If you are an Apple fan and find yourself arguing that your employer should be
using piles of minis-running-Linux based on this article, don't.

~~~
recuter
Apple has not failed with the mini because it never tried for this sort of
thing in the first place - it is a happy accident. And one that I believe they
noticed and allowed to go on organically with the bare minimum of effort on
their part.

The reason collocating minis is intriguing is this: This consumer grade
hardware has gotten so reliable and powerful that it makes for a very good
server - being a consumer SKU means it has a production run orders of
magnitude greater than a Dell server for example.

Thus a Mini is disposable. It is almost like a Raspberry Pi. A proper server
will obviously be more bang for the buck in terms of raw hardware specs, but
the TCO of a Mini is favorable because you can resell it and it has a good,
none-enterprise-y warranty.

A fully loaded Mini amortized comes out to something like $50/month. It also
blows EC2, 'etc, completely out of the water. In the rather rare case of it
failing it is simply swapped out by the facility with _exactly equivalent_
hardware in short order while yours gets handed off to Apple Care, at which
point you can simply ebay it for 70%+ of its original price and get a brand
new one switched back, all in a matter of a day or two. If you need to "spin
up" more, there are always more laying around that can be provided by the
facility immediately. Dedicated hardware that is so flexible and convenient is
a powerful thing. Depending on your use case you could get away with running
on just a couple of minis and save quite a lot of money.

If you buy them in threes for redundancy Apple offers nice discounts and
financing. You want to compare how much performance you get out of three minis
for $200/mo (total) to what that would cost you on Heroku?

Oh and I'm pretty sure you can boot linux from an SD card or some such.

~~~
alrs
Apple failed in the server market. They have had success with the Mini.

A Mini is cheaper than EC2, but that isn't the point of EC2.

You don't run in EC2 because it is cheap or performant, you run there because
you can spin up virtual machines quickly. You run there because it is adjacent
to S3. You run there becuase it integrates with the likes of RDS, ELB, and
Route 53.

~~~
recuter
It depends on your use case of course. If you spin up dozens of instances all
the time then sure - but keep in mind that an email like "put another mini in
my rack" gets executed in a few hours and is equivalent to _quite a lot of
compute units_.

That's rather the point, even very large spikes in growth can be swallowed by
just a few of these in theory and certainly there are always enough Minis in
close proximity such that it makes no difference.

~~~
alrs
I disagree.

EC2 is inherently unreliable, and so are consumer-grade desktops like Mac
Minis.

The strategy in EC2 is to be able to spin up replacements very quickly when
your instances fail.

The only strategy for a non-power-redundant, non-RAID, no-IPMI Mac Mini
failure is the same, except replacement is measured in minutes or hours
instead of seconds. This is huge.

~~~
derefr
If you're running above-capacity, a single failure of a box in any working set
(routers, database shards, app servers, etc.) doesn't matter. Just wait the
few hours and let the rest of your boxes silently absorb the load.

If you're running exactly-at-capacity: why?

(This presumes, though, that you're Highly Available enough to begin with that
one node lost is a quantitative, not qualitative, failure in your system. If
you only have one app server, time-to-reprovision is the least of your
worries.)

------
lucian1900
This seems very odd to me. Why restrict one's self to an unsupported,
proprietary, unvirtualisable OS when Linux and the BSDs are neither of those
things and very similar.

~~~
jdboyd
OSX is virtualizable, but they only let you do it (license wise) on Mac
hardware.

~~~
lucian1900
Which makes it unvirtualisable for practical purposes.

------
alrs
“We thought about applying it to other hardware, but if Dell makes a small
little machine, you don’t know that they’ll be making that, in that form
factor, six months down the road, or what they’re going to do, or how they’re
going to refresh it,”

This is completely upside-down. Apple's future plans are entirely opaque. When
Dell releases an Optiplex desktop, Poweredge server, or Latitude laptop they
commit to not making changes for some non-trivial amount of time so that
corporate images don't need to be fiddled with.

------
MattRogish
At a previous job, we used <http://www.macminicolo.net/> for a couple of
years. Awesome (awesome!) service, great pricing. Haven't been with them in
about a year, but I haven't heard anything bad about them since I left...

~~~
meric
What did they do with your mini when you left?

~~~
MattRogish
I left the company, I assume they returned it.

------
kunai
As far as servers go, if you don't need the sophistication of OS X and its
great development tools and process handling, why not just use an off-the-
shelf and supported desktop (i.e., Lenovo ThinkCentre) with *BSD on it? Paying
the premium for monolithic construction and an OS that is likely never going
to see the height of its potential in a specified application seems a bit
much.

~~~
mitchty
Then you can legally virtualize osx.

------
trotsky
A big part of what's pushing the mini use in the datacenter is that pretty
much everybody will give you a cheaper colo deal with less restrictions than a
1u. Because the mini lacks stuff like raid, multiple nics, ipmi etc. the
typical customer can be relied on to have a pretty idle server. The mobile
parts help, but if you filled one of those high density mini racks and used
them as compute servers or cloud hosts or something your rack would melt just
as fast as any cpu heavy stack of 1us. But with almost everyone just running a
hobby website, directory server or mdm you can fit 10 or 15 of those things
into to the power budget of a 1u or 2u cdn edge box.

You can see the artifacts in a lot of their price lists. Dedicated colo? Sure,
$35. Oh you want a managed firewall in front of it? that'll be $50 extra. Want
some space on our fault tolerant SAN? No problem, $200.

I bet it's a great way for a hosting company to get some use out of cages in
the popular dc's that can't sell any more power.

------
LinaLauneBaer
At <http://objective-cloud.com> we are also using Mac Minis with SSDs and 16
GB of RAM. A single Mac Mini can do so much - computing wise. The only bad
thing about Mac Minis is their GPU which may make some use cases less
efficient to realize.

------
alrs
"'I’d say the biggest worry is that it runs on 2.5in drives,' Stucki said.
'But, those have been come more reliable lately, and especially in stationary
machines like a server.'"

2.5" drives are reputed to be more reliable than 3.5" drives, due to less
rotational vibration. The advantage of 3.5" is density.

------
rdl
I have one in a 2-mini shelf in the colo to do OSX Server device
management/etc. stuff. It's..interesting. Apple seems to keep changing their
remote management tools, and unless you have Kerberos set up, there's no good
way to do cut-and-paste long random passwords or anything else through the
remote desktop tool (it doesn't work during the secure password input window).

Probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they have a very specific
need; a comparable Atom-based Linux server is cheaper, easier to manage, etc.
If you need performance, you can get a low-end i7 based server, and if you
need ECC, etc., get a low-end Xeon.

The hardware is fine; it's OSX that is lacking.

------
bitcartel
The posted link doesn't have any /. comments, try this instead:

[http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/03/01/2252215/among-
serve...](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/03/01/2252215/among-servers-
apples-mac-mini-quietly-gains-ground)

------
cek
I call this concept "Ubiservers" for Ubiquitous Servers. The idea is the
consumer demand for highly integrated computing devices, based on SoCs,
combined with Moore's law being applied to solid-state storage will lead to
very small devices that 'serve' content or computing to others becoming
ubiquitous.

Raspberry Pi is another example of this reality.

------
guylhem
Why I do have one and you should consider getting one:

\- reliable : besides the 2nd HD giving SMART errors and that I had
preventively changed, I never had one hardware problem in over 3 years. It's
on 24/7 and on UPS. I have a second one without UPS, also working like a
charm.

\- small : whenever you need a server, it will fit.

\- green : it won't suck too much power, so it won't overheat. I live in a
tropical climate- this matters to me.

\- versatile : it can be reconverted into a small desktop when you no longer
need it.

\- standardized : you don't have to worry about the video card or the revision
of whatever internal piece changing between batches. If you compile your own
linux kernels, that's a godsend.

\- easy to find : you need one in a hurry? There are applestores everywhere.
now try and get me a dell server in the next hour.

\- osx already installed : sure Linux might be better in many cases, but my
time is not free. OSX total configuration time tops 20 minutes, including
plugging cables.

\- quick to configure : if you just need something for php+psql, download osx
server package and you're ready to go (That's included in my 20 minutes
estimate). It's sucking less than the previous versions (I hated snow leopard
server). If you are not in a big hurry, I recommend instead to install your
own utilities.

In both cases you can keep .dmg, which is useful in some work environments
where for security reasons there is no internet connection.

Oh and here is a reason why I love rudix - prepackaged GNU utilities, with
everything included.

 _No I do not want to recompile stuff. No I do not want to even think about
tracking dependancies! If I need say mc, I want a .dmg which contains the
whole thing and the libs, and that I can install on another machine
immediately without worrying about glib or stuff._

TLDR; the mac mini is great. OSX Server "acceptable", but most of it can be
replaced by rudix.

Sure you may be better served by a custom built machine, or a cloud service,
but when you want something working ASAP on an intranet, I haven't found
anything better yet.

I'm not even talking about the sweet no-questions apple warranty, or the
rescue procedure standardization (alt key : will boot on CD or USB) common to
all apple hardware. I don't want to remember if F1 or F10 or F12 will get me
in the bios, or where I will have to click to let me boot from usb.

I buy mac minis because it's the best hardware I've found for my needs (and I
say that while trying some hackintoshes time to time!)

If you haven't tried one yet, it is worth experimenting with.

BTW on <http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD389LL> I see the 16Gb RAM
upgrade is getting "more affordable", but I really would like to get a mini
with 32 or 64 gigs.

EDIT: I know that RedHat, Debian, etc installation can be automated. If you
have thousands of identical machines using known-to-be-supported hardware, and
highly specific needs requiring a gazillion of .debs it's great (+)

But let's say it's 7pm and you need just one machine with apache to serve a
php website on the intranet. Do you want to automate an installation and tweak
it, or just take a box where a Unix is already installed, along with vi,
apache, and the basic tools you need? Some minor configuration file edits will
make that box production ready in a matter of minutes. (And BTW OSX software
installation can be automated as well)

\+ : automated installs do not fully remove hardware variation issues or make
sure the drivers work. The best part of apple hardware is that it generally
evolves very slowly - your kernel bins, modules, etc. will usually require
more tweaking on 5 dells of the same model than on 20 different imacs (!)

In the ends, it's all about costs, and return to scale.

If you have thousands of linux boxes, it's a good idea to use cheaper hardware
(and buy spares!) along with install automatization : high fixed cost, low
marginal costs.

For lower volumes, a different solution means I have to spend far less time on
it, which lets me concentrate on the real work.

~~~
ciupicri
_> easy to find : you need one in a hurry? There are applestores everywhere._

Maybe in your country.

 _> osx already installed : sure Linux might be better in many cases, but my
time is not free. OSX total configuration time tops 20 minutes, including
plugging cables._

I'm not familiar with OSX, but the installation process for Red Hat based
distributions can be automated.

~~~
taligent
Which country do you live in that doesn't have Apple retailers ?

Because it sounds like an amazing business opportunity.

~~~
ciupicri
I haven't said there's no Apple retailer just that they aren't everywhere. I'm
also wondering how many of them have mini-Macs on stock, since iPhones are way
more popular.

I live in Romania and I _think_ that our neighbors are in a similar situation.

------
niggler
Any chance for the Xserve line returning?

Now I use HP DL360s, but I used to love the Xserve !U servers

~~~
ams6110
I would say almost certainly no. Apple has clearly become a consumer/retail
oriented company; few organizations ever really bought into the idea of the
Xserve line, and to the extent Apple are still interested in "enterprise"
sales it's for MacBooks and iOS devices.

------
jiggy2011
What advantages do you get in deploying something to OS X vs deploying to
Linux?

~~~
hollerith
Someone who already knows os x gets the advantage of not having to learn
linux.

~~~
jiggy2011
But surely at this point you are going to be doing everything via SSH at which
point the differences are going to be small, although you might be better
going with FreeBSD I guess.

------
Nux
Mac Minis are an absolute niche and will get buried by the "cloud" anyway.

------
taligent
As someone who uses Mac Minis for servers the biggest reason is value.

I can fit 2 Mac Minis in a 1RU. And that is a Core i7, 16GB, 2xSSD which is
about 20-30x faster than what Amazon, Rackspace offers for the same price. Now
throw in the fact that you can (a) send it back to Apple if it breaks or (b)
sell it on eBay for nearly the same price it all becomes very compelling.

Given that I use a Java/Hazelcast/Cassandra stack I can simply add more Mac
Minis to linearly scale with no single point of failure.

~~~
chiph
I'm in the market for a couple for installing MySQL Cluster Edition on. I'll
probably buy new (for a DOA warranty) and I'm going to skip AppleCare on them
- I've had zero failures on the other Minis I've had. I've found that like you
said, the used market prices are so strong that unless you're penny-pinching,
there's no good reason to buy used.

If there is a discount for buying 3 or more at a time like recuter said above,
I may investigate doing that, if it's a steep enough discount. :)

EDIT: Just chatted with Apple sales, and discounts are only for business
customers, not individuals. :(

