Yeah you're really quite tied into apple hardware here... I wonder if it would be possible to run mac os x server instances on VMs? Good luck anyway... I often wanted to use cocoa server side since it's such a great platform and xcode's pretty great too.
I generally find the hardware cost is not dominant with respect to bandwidth and physical placement costs. So even if you pay almost twice as much per compute cycle[1] it is still buried in the other deployment costs.
The bit that keeps me from using Mac Minis (and I have a huge software reason to do it) on my server end is that I don't trust that I can manage them remotely. If I can't get to a console and reboot with remote media I'm not willing to commit to it in production. If you are big enough to have 24x7 staff colocated with your hardware then things are a little different. Then they'll just cuss at you for making them drive a little cart with a monitor and keyboard around the place.
EOM
[1] It isn't that high for one unit, compared to reasonable quality commodity gear, but when you look to comparing, say 16 Core i5 processors of power there are some nice commodity solutions that are much cheaper than 16 minis.
There must be remote management systems that will capture DVI output and provide mouse/keyboard commands over USB. Modern Macs all do netboot so that takes care of the remote media. Probably isn't cheap, though.
Thanks. I am sure that it is possible to do the same thing we do by running OS X in a virtual machine. We decided not to do it like this. Let's see how it works out.
If I'm not wrong Tim Cook did hint at a revamp Mac Pro in spring 2013. I believe it will be build for server farm as Apple itself needs hardware for their own server farm.
Maybe. He's said they will have something for pros, which most people take to mean a revamped Mac Pro. But it could also be just a variant of the Macbook Pro, or something else entirely.