

Apple's communication gap irks business buyers (Xserve death) - MikeCapone
http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/07/technology/apple_xserve/index.htm?hpt=C2

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SwellJoe
We sell to and support thousands of hosting customers. We have _two_ customers
running Virtualmin licenses on XServe machines, and only one is exclusively a
Mac OS X shop. The cost of running XServes is simply so much higher than
running many other quite high end rackmount server products from Dell, IBM,
HP, Sun, etc., and as a server OS Mac OS X is way behind Linux. apt-get or yum
alone makes Linux vastly superior when managing a large number of servers, but
it's also worth noting that Mac OS X has historically had broken NIS, LDAP,
PAM, NFS, and SMB/CIFS integration, sometimes for months at a time. I had the
task of integrating Mac OS X in a client role in a mid-sized company a few
years back, and it was not pleasant. Damned near nothing network-related
worked, and the Macs ended up being off-the-grid in most regards because they
simply couldn't play with the existing authentication and file sharing
options.

Also, real servers have a lifecycle measured in years, and very predictable
availability. Dropping them with a four month notice is just a slap in the
face to IT guys who have to deal with the fallout. I don't have a problem with
Apple leaving the server market (since they were never very good at it), but
it's kinda crappy to their customers to do it without a reasonable amount of
notice.

~~~
zppx
For me this was foreseeable, a guy I know bought a PowerMac G5 in 2006, an
expensive high end workstation, generally this type of machine can be used for
5 to 7 years without much problems, if you upgrade the hardware it can last
even longer, although you probably won't try to use it to deal with
performance demanding taks, Apple slapped him in the face, he cannot even run
Snow Leopard in a four years old workstation.

~~~
zdw
Apple announced the PPC -> Intel transition in June of of 2005, and the first
Intel macs were release January 2006:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–Intel_transition>

The writing was on the wall for anyone looking to keep a machine for a long
time.

~~~
zppx
True, but it's a 4 years old machine, I do not know about you, but I do expect
that a Workstation will be supported for 5 years at least, maybe this got lost
in the world in which a guy buys a iPhone every year, back them Apple had no
iOS devices, it was the Mac and iPod (which was a fairly simple environment),
so I disagree that it was so simple to predict about that 4 years in the
future you would be unable to upgrade to a new version, Apple did not said
back them that you would be unable to run the a new version of the OS in 3 and
a half years.

------
bradleyland

      Without getting too wonky about the finer points  
      of "blade servers," the Xserve is essentially a  
      high-powered Macintosh computer with additional  
      features to help it network with other computers or  
      host websites.
    

Without getting in to the finer points of almonds, the peanut is a legume
whose seeds grow underground.

------
hvs
I'm wondering who the CTO is at these companies that _allowed_ IT to go with
Apple servers. I'm not hating on Apple, I'm just saying that when you think
"corporate IT" do you think "Apple"? The last type of company that you want to
work with in IT is one that has a nasty habit of surprising its customers
every 6 months. You want a big, dependable, boring company.

~~~
tedunangst
They were hardly large deployments. It's telling that their enterprise
customer quote was from the "IT director at Washingtonian.com, which runs two
Xserves to support a website".

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wccrawford
Apple's decision didn't surprise me much. Yeah, I thought they could have
handle it a bit more tactfully, but the decision to drop the XServe line
didn't surprise me.

Why? Because ours is awful. We bought it to be the office do-everything
server. It ended up doing roaming profiles, file sharing (poorly, since we
also have Windows machines and that seemed to be a constant headache) and Time
Machine backups (also a major headache). At one point, it did Gateway and DNS
stuff, too, but it couldn't really do what we wanted, and we went back to
Linux for those.

And then recently we ended up moving to a NAS for the file serving and Time
Machine backups, and that's been much nicer.

We tried to hook a tape drive to the XServe to make proper backups, but it
never worked right from the start. We ended up having to pick a subset of what
we really wanted to back up, and then it kept having issues even then.

We were also told that we could virtualize Windows on it (a few instances) but
it was quite obvious that it didn't have the power for that before we even
really got started.

------
acdha
Anyone buying Xserves was already irked. OS X just isn't there QA-wise or
support-wise (oh, gee, wasn't it cute when they broke NFS permissions until
the next release?) for anything like a traditional server role. It's just not
a priority for Apple except where it was a necessity for selling Mac clients.

------
tshtf
From the article: "A survey of 1,200 Xserve customers conducted by the
Enterprise Desktop Alliance found that 70% of Xserve customers say Apple's
announcement will have no impact on their organization's decision to buy new
Macs."

I think a more interesting look is that 30% of XServe customers say Apple's
announcement will impact their organization's decision to buy new Macs (or
didn't respond).

------
zdw
disclaimer: I support Apple products as a main focus of my business.

If you look at what Steve Jobs has said about the enterprise market, it's
pretty much that the users of the product aren't the people making the
purchases.

For this reason, Apple is making inroads on the other end - the C-level exec
buys an iPhone, loves it, and starts buying other Apple gear, which IT
grumbles about but integrates.

Apple cares about IT as a function of interoperability, not as a place to take
over - it's fundamentally boring.

The biggest "Enterprise" related feature gains made by Apple in the last few
years are all iOS management and email integration related, not desktop
computer support related.

Desktop computing will live on, it just won't be where all the whiz-bang neat
stuff happens, on any platform - witness all the mobile device and new
interface (Kinect hacks anyone?) innovation, whereas Mac OS X 10.6 isn't all
that different from 10.4 or Windows 7 from XP.

------
TheCondor
What does Apple use inside their datacenters?

Any one know?

~~~
spitfire
It always felt to me like Apple was targeting small shops and departmental
servers. I've never heard of anyone having a real xserve datacenter, but I've
heard of tons of companies running on xserves for infrastructure.

~~~
TheCondor
Yeah, OSX Server is perfect for something like that. I was just curious, I
sort of figured iTunes ran on XServes in various data centers.

~~~
jonhendry
I doubt Apple would limit their internal technology to the configurations they
offer on the market.

They're free to run OS X Server on non-Apple hardware, even if buyers aren't
supposed to, and wouldn't have any trouble getting OS support. They could use
off-the-shelf commodity-priced rack hardware, or they could do like Google and
have custom rack PCs made to spec. Or they could virtualize OS X.

And they're free to run WebObjects on non-Apple hardware. (Actually, I think
anyone can do that, because it's Java.)

~~~
semanticist
I don't think they use Mac OS X Server that widely. We were told their
deployment platform was Oracle Linux, which is a rebranded version of RHEL.

------
te_chris
I thought most Xserves were sold to be used in media situations, i.e. running
final cut asset sharing systems and render farms for compositing etc etc. The
film industry will surely be pissed? Then again, just ask all the people who
were devoted Shake users

