Q: A Sad day.. Xserve discontinued...

STUPID STUPID STUPID!

Just about had a new budget approved with the board for 6 more xserves, 2 Activeraid 32TB fibre SANs, and episode engine pro on top for clustering the encoders.

NOW WHAT?! 36 rack spaces of mac pro instead of 6? Yea, NOT!

Like Apple can't afford to keep a small enterprise development department open anymore... FFS!

dkincaid wrote:
STUPID STUPID STUPID!

Just about had a new budget approved with the board for 6 more xserves, 2 Activeraid 32TB fibre SANs, and episode engine pro on top for clustering the encoders.

NOW WHAT?! 36 rack spaces of mac pro instead of 6? Yea, NOT!

Like Apple can't afford to keep a small enterprise development department open anymore... FFS!

dkincaid -

You may want to consider upgrading to Episode 6 as it runs on both Mac & PC. You can cluster both Macs & PCs together too. I completely hear you, our 34 Mac Episode Engine clusters all running on nice compact Xserves will be migrating to HP Blades and Episode 6. Painful, but at least Telestream thought ahead and cares more about its customer's needs than Apple.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and comment in this thread.

I am not an Xserve user, but I am an Apple customer in creative/media industry,
and I do follow them very closely.

When I read about the death of Xserve, I knew something was amiss.
Something about this just doesn't add up with other facts on the ground.

In the past 30 days (give or take):

Apple completed a 500,000 sq. ft. Data Center of their own in North Carolina that CFO Peter Oppenheimer said at Apple's fourth quarter earnings call was on schedule and ready for operation before the years end 2010.

It has also come to light that before this new data center has even opened doors, Apple has obtained construction permits, submitted drawings, and even already starting clearing ground for the foundation of a second identical 500,000 sq. ft. Data Center on the same property.

Furthermore, to flog a dead horse, early this year they also hired a real-estate search firm based in Dallas to assist them in a shopping spree of used data-centers around the country.

If only for their own needs, they could not possibly be getting out of the server business. What servers do they intend to fill their own data centers with? Surely not Dells! Perhaps their own server needs are currently consuming all of their manufacturing capacity? Could that even be possible? That's probably not the answer, but...

Back to the timeline... so in the last 30 days, they also revealed that they have entered into a strategic partnership with Unisys for corporate sales in their enterprise division.

Oh, and by the way, they discontinued Xserve.

Wait, which fact doesn't seem to belong with the others?

*Something else is at play here.*

Here is my speculation: During the course of constructing this massive data center in North Carolina, not just their largest, but one of the largest anywhere in the world, that they had to have taken a long hard look at their own server hardware -- What did their own internal team want in a server?

I suspect that they have a new server line about to launch. That the first of these models off the assembly line are currently filling rack space in North Carolina, and that an announcement will come soon, perhaps early 2011, for a completely new line of servers, and everything is being held close to their vest.

Is being this secretive (as they always are in the consumer space) really the smart way to go with the enterprise, where companies and IT departments need to plan and prepare years out? No. It's probably not the way it should be done at all. But that is what I think is going on.

If this theory has giant holes in it, feel free to debunk. I'm genuinely all ears for input.

cheers,
Chris

Chris Grayson wrote:

If only for their own needs, they could not possibly be getting out of the server business. What servers do they intend to fill their own data centers with? Surely not Dells! Perhaps their own server needs are currently consuming all of their manufacturing capacity? Could that even be possible?

We've know over the years they already used other systems like IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and others. What did they do before Xserve? Had to use something. I'm an Xserve fan, and I manage several of them, but even the Xserve doesn't fit all rackable server needs. At any rate, we know they're using a mixture of other hardware. How much of it do they run OS X Server on? Probably very little, if at all of the consumer version, but perhaps some tweaked versions. At those huge scales, machines don't run a multi-purpose OS/App combo like OS X Server. They tend to run very specific things, and get tailored to their purpose (which is why Linux is so popular as a server OS).

I suspect that they have a new server line about to launch. That the first of these models off the assembly line are currently filling rack space in North Carolina, and that an announcement will come soon, perhaps early 2011, for a completely new line of servers, and everything is being held close to their vest.

Nope. While Apple like's its secrets, even they would not be so dumb as to generate this much ill will on purpose. They're not dumb, they knew the complaints and petitions would come flying. If there was something new coming, they'd have just announced it. The past couple years or so, they've started to announce things ahead of their availability (something they just didn't do in the past). Look at every other model transition. Availability dwindles, the new machine is announced, the remaining inventory is cleared out. There's no reason to do anything different with the Xserve.

With this much ill will generated, by now they would have said something like "Gee, didn't mean to tick everyone off, we have something coming, just can't say what it is yet."

Too much anger and distrust has been generated to justify the delay in an announcement, and they would have known that ahead of time.

So, nope. It's a done deal. There's no new hardware, I and highly doubt there's any partnership with another server vendor in the wings. Again, they would have already announced it, and it opens way too big a can of worms.

Your best option is to go learn FreeBSD or Linux, or if you have a lot of systems, have a look at Sun servers--if you can stand Oracle.

Were an entirely Mac School District. We have a total of 93 xserves over 29 sites. Were the size of West Virginia. Im saddened in this move, but maybe a couple of Dell blades wtih Parallels and 10.6 Server over the top might work out. We just rolled out 28 New Xserves in March, and now there pulling the plug on the whole thing. We have all of our services hosted on our Apple stack, wiki/blogs, mail, netboot, ical. This is going to get interesting.

First, the 28 Xserves you rolled out will continue to work for their serviceable lifetime. Not a pleasant thing Apple has done, to be sure, but it would be unwise — I'd go so far as to say "foolish" — to pull the plug overnight.

Second, you cannot currently virtualize Mac OS X Server on anything but Apple hardware — so the Parallels on Dell blades plan is not going to work out. See http://AppleOpenLetter.org for some thoughts on this.

I've compiled a few thoughts on future storage and networking options for Macs in creative environments. Please feel free to read and post comments:

http://www.empoweringcreativity.com

In the meantime, I lovingly suggest we fortify the current infrastructures that we have so that they can run well for the next 3 to 5 years.

Xserve discontinued.... Unfortunately my believe in Steve Jobs is going down the drain. What a mess of a strategy....

It's been stated that Xserve hasn't been very profitable for Apple for the past few years. Unfortunately, that's what happens to products that don't make money. It's business.

It's struck me that more serious enterprise consumers don't use Xserve anyways, opting for IBM or Sun systems.

We use Sun servers and Solaris, which are in a different league to the Xserve and OS X. However, the Xserve is still the best way to manage our Macs. The Mini and Pro don't cut it as replacements.

Getting rid of the Xserve is going to make it more difficult to support Macs in the Education and Enterprise space, unless Lion provides better integration with AD & Open LDAP and SMB/CIFS and NFSv4.

The Xserve might not have been profitable, but the advantage to Apple was the buy in to the rest of the Apple platform. Without the Xserve or a rack ready OS X Server solution, they lose this selling point (for Enterprise and Education at least) and the only thing left is to make it work out of the box with nix and Windows.

Given that Lion is going to introduce the app store, it sounds like any desktops are going to be firmly aimed at the consumer market.

Interesting times. I wonder if sales will fall on the iMac and if Apple will even care. So much for back to the Mac.

The more I think about the situation the more I doubt that I will ever be able to trust Apple enough to place or recommend anything Apple in a server room ever again. It would be almost pointless now for them to announce an Xserve replacement, the damage is done. This might be the end of the line for me with Apple.

An Apple fan 1989 - 2010

I have to agree with many here, we are all disappointed after all the support we have given to the platform, not to mention we are the laughing stock of the IT dept in enterprises where we are the minority.

One thing though, some of the comments here read as if they were written by a moody teenager. This is not the time to throw away your knowledge and experience and build some sort of apple device bonfire.

I strongly believe that there is something coming soon. In the meantime, the xserves we have are working like they always have. I'm ordering 2 more this month and I expect a new enterprise level solution in the future. I will not pull the plug on a successful operation without first weighing the cost. I agree, a Mac Pro or Mac Mini simply will not cut it in my environment, where dual power supply, LOM and hot pluggable drives are a must. But when considering the alternatives, if it came down to it, I would choose a room full of minis over managing a windows environment again.

Granted, this whole episode was very poorly handled, but it is by no means the end of the world.

All I say is, stay tuned...

Apple announcing the discontinuing of the Xserver without any real sign for a successor (MacPro and MacMini are hack-job wannabes for enterprise use - not successors) is almost as bad as Microsofts announcement to discontinue / remove the drive extender functionality in their home server. For them, HP and others are leaving them.

The functionality Microsoft removed is losing them vendors, even though it only offends consumer users rather than enterprise users. For Apple, the disappearance of the Xserve, without successor, is a greater insult to their customers, as WE have more money invested in your products than a home user. We spend more money. We use more units, which must be crammed into limited rack units.

I have a double wide 42u cage. That's 84 Xserves or about 8 tubby MacPro "servers" and your MacMini "servers" won't cut it for most of our needs. There's not multiple network interfaces. There's not an expansion option. No SCSI. No Fiber. No hardware RAID. No RAID beyond mirroring. No hot-swap. No 1U mounting brackets. No front power button. No redundant power. (And the list goes on and on, just from what we ARE USING on our Xserves, let alone where we wanted to go with our implementations.)

This is a sign to Apple... Arrogance can be found in any business. True usefulness is what makes a company worth investing in. If you have a plan, SPEAK UP QUICKLY!

Nah, not Avid, Adobe.
Avid is so 1996.