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Q: A Sad day.. Xserve discontinued...
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Nov 5, 2010 12:50 PMby beatle20359,I love my Mac Pro and my Mac MIni server. Both are great machines at doing certain tasks.. Do I have an Xserve at home.. Nope because it's not the right product for my home.
On the other hand do I have a Mac Pro or a Mini in my server room.. Absolutely not. I have 6 Intel Xserves, one G4 Xserve which is 8 years old and still working. 2 Xserve Raids and 2 Promise RAIDS.. Why.. Because they are the best tools for the job of looking after 300 people around the globe in 5 different timezones in a company that made the switch to Apple in late 2006 and hasn't regretted it one bit until today..
How long does it take to swap a PSU on a Mac Pro... Can you hot-swap the drives? Can you get a warning mail that your air conditioning units aren't working properly as the temperature has changed.. Will I be able to rack mount the Mac Pro horizontally and use the DVD drive.. No...
The Mac Pro and Xserve share a few of the same components, they are no doubt built at the same factories and really an update every 12-18months would be fine by me and most of us on here. Without a viable alternative how can I recommend to companies that they'll be more productive using a wholly Apple based solution. I'm sure there are a few companies that will design a mod for the Mac Pro to mount it properly but this isn't what we want.
Come on Apple offer us a proper alternative or keep the xserve going.. Look at the G4 Tower server... Bet that didn't sell well....
Beatle -
Nov 5, 2010 1:38 PMby giezi,This is so sad!
We love the Xserve, the Mac Pro is not equivalent alternative for Rack Installations and have no redundant power supplys and less memory slots!
Please, please, bring us back the Xserve OR allow us to run OS X Server with HP / Dell rack servers on VMware ESX or Xenserver...
Regards
Reto -
Nov 5, 2010 2:38 PMby Theo_Stauffer,This is a terrible day for me personally and for my company. We made the (now) stupid decision to go with Apple's Xserves and XRAID back in 2006 and now, with three months notice, just after we've budgeted for new XServes next year, Apple kills the entire thing off!
Now our board have decided that they're going to transition the entire company, servers and clients to Windows, because although they're well aware of the pros of using Mac clients, they feel that Apple can simply not be relied upon.
As I said, a sad day. -
Nov 5, 2010 9:35 PMby MattyMacMan,I too am very shocked and sad as well. I am a community college professor teaching web site design, animation and film production. We consistently use Apple, as well as Adobe products. I have two XServes (Intel and G5) and while there have been bumps in the road, I use ARD, file servicing and imagine services to keep my lab running at top speed. However, I cannot for the life of me see what Apple is doing here. I'm completely lost!
For sometime, since Final Cut Studio has been put in limbo and the large attention paid to iOS devices, I'm beginning to truly feel uneasy about placing new Macs into my lab. What's the advantage? Sure graphic designers still prefer them, but if Apple abandons FCS, makes 10.7 a hybrid of iOS requiring people to purchase all new hardware to support elements that could be easily written into older hardware architecture platforms, Apple abandoning a 10.7 server OS...I can no longer justify the added expense of a Mac multimedia lab any longer.
I can run Win7 or whatever is next, Adobe Creative Suite and Avid Media Composer just as easily on some heaping Dell machine.
Since being here at our college for 11 years, it's taken me a long time to convince that Apple was the way to go, and students saved their dollars for Apple products but today, Apple's actions are suspect to say the least. -
Nov 6, 2010 4:04 AMby macintoshxsandaddy,So after almost 18 years working on the mac platform and having gone from being marginalised by corporate IT to actually finally being taken seriously. We are going to go back to square one again. We all know that we have all played a part in apples success over the last ten years if it wasn't for us changing the opinions of business users they would never have had the succes that they have had off the back of the of our dedication and hard work.
What really annoys me is that this announcement will damage my position and the respect I have earned. I am currently working on my Capex for 2010 as well as looking at my 5 year plan and honestly and as soon as my hardware is end of life in the next 2 years I will be moving to PC based Avid's and ditching FCP and XSAN, because moving to a bigger office so I can expand my data center to facilitate 15 macpro's in racks just isn't a viable solution.
While I'm at it I might as well go and do an MCSE because I doubt that there will be any Apple corporate jobs in the next 5 years.
Thanks apple (note the lowercase a) for undermining all the hard work we have done to improve your standing in the corporate markets. Thanks apple for showing us that you really don't give a s**t about all the hardcore behind the scenes guys. Thanks apple for showing us that you are ultimately just another microsoft who is only interested in your profit margin. Remember that with out all of us developing and improving the platform and spreading the love behind the scenes.......You are going to be nothing more than a novelty hardware manufacturer making shiny trinkets for the moronic masses.
Thanks for nothing! -
Nov 6, 2010 8:13 AMby CMD,"This is just what the old IT hands always said--that Apple was unpredictable and could one day just abandon the business market."
That is it in a nutshell: very few in the market targeted by the Xserve ever really trusted Apple's commitment to enterprise to begin with, and this decision just totally killed it off. So long as Jobs is at the helm of Apple, Apple will continue to make billions of dollars in profit every year, but the enterprise market will never trust him again after this. Even if Apple were to bring back the Xserve next year, absolutely no one with half a brain would make the investment in it.
Now, that being said, Apple has never been much of an enterprise company to begin with. The Xserve was at best a half-hearted attempt to provide a solution, more of a "throw it on the wall and see if it sticks" sort of thing rather than a serious effort to crowbar *nix and Windows out of enterprise. Take a look at this thread: Apple announces a discontinuance of the Xserve and this thread grows to a whopping 4 pages! Wow! Basically, the silence is deafening. Apple is probably far more successful with enterprise solutions in the small business market - exactly what the Mini server and Mac Pro are useful for.
My major question at this point is what exactly Apple is planning to do with their own data centers over the coming years. I mean, can you imagine a picture leaking out of an Apple data center with thousands of Dell rack-mounts? How funny would that be? And what OS would those things be running? Some sort of internally-bastardized version of OSX Server? Wouldn't that be a hoot to see Apple using their own server OS on a third party machine that they don't allow outside their own data center? Talk about eye-rolling. That sort of thing will just make Apple even more of a laughing-stock in the enterprise market than they already are today. -
Nov 6, 2010 8:56 AMby Kevin Smith4,So much wishful thinking here, but the reality is Mac OS X Server for enterprise is dead. Apple is not going to pull some magic rabbit out of its hat:
--They are not going to license server to run on other hardware.
--They are not going to do some enterprise server in the cloud thing in their new NC data center.
--They are not going to sell server apps to run on client machines in the Mac App Store.
--They do not envision racks full of Mac Pros and/or Mac minis.
--And they are not going to do whatever else anyone dreams up to somehow keep them in the enterprise server space.
If Apple was going to do any of these things they would have announced it and then discontinued the Xserve, and with more than a few months notice -- not the other way around. -
Nov 6, 2010 9:17 AMby CMD,They'll keep OSX Server, for a while at least. It's not like this announcement suddenly invalidated every Xserve running out there. The Xserve that was bought yesterday will be a useful machine for at least 3 to 5 years from now. I agree that Apple isn't taking the transition seriously, though: it's really almost as though their transition guide was written more tongue-in-cheek than as a serious document. I mean, really, who in their right mind is going to put a bunch of 12U Mac Pros in a server room? The very idea is a joke. I saw a photograph once of some university that did that about a year before the Xserve was introduced, and the whole thing looked like a "you-gotta-be-kidding-me" joke. I'm sure it worked, but the space required was just laughable. And no one could possibly take the whole "get a bunch of minis and line them up on a rack" idea seriously. I can only imagine the laughter when the guys at Apple were writing that document.
I do have to say this, though: they probably have something in mind as an acceptable replacement down the road, if for no other reason than they're going to need something internally. Effectively, as far as I can see, this is really the only reason the Xserve was developed in the first place: Apple needed something for their own server needs. They put it on sale to the public just because they had it for themselves and figured they could make a little money on the side with it; I'm sure throughout its life the Xserve sold horribly - the numbers must have been atrocious, what probably amounted to no more than a mere few thousand units a year. That they've discontinued it simply means to me that they have some other sort of solution in mind for their own internal needs; I just cannot imagine Apple actually populating their own datacenters with Dells. -
Nov 6, 2010 9:24 AMby beatle20359,Hi Cmdpilot,
Although this thread is a whopping 4 pages with almost 4,000 page views. Think about how many of us have invested in multiple xserves, storage,xsans and other solutions over the last 8 years. We are talking millions in investment from companies and millions of $ in sales to Apple. I'm a fully versed Windows server engineer, Exchange wiz and perfectly happy looking after MS products.....Where they are the best solution that is.. However for the last 4 years i've been persuading companies to move to the mac.. Granted in the PPC days, Apple were not always the most attractive option but once things were transitioned to Intel it offered the balance of running Windows and OSX on hardware that for the most part that was better built. Thus easing the users migration to a new system..
I hit a milestone a few months back where the last of our Windows stalwarts at work decided to take the plunge and move to the mac. For 4 years he had refused, for longer than that he had derided Apple for making products that businesses didn't want to use and that were inferior to their Windows based counterparts. All it took was lending him a mac laptop for a few weeks and he was sold on the idea. Not once have I had a user whinge about moving to the mac.. They might have been sceptical but were won over in a short space of time.
All it took for the company I work for to make the switch to a fully OSX Server based infrastructure was the TCO and how products like Kerio & Communigate performed on an Xserve against continuing the costly AD/Exchange setup we were running at the time. The unlimited user licenses that were bundled with the Xserve, the little extras like podcast producer and the integrated Wiki. But the big selling point was how happy the users were with their mac laptops/desktops. If Apple built such great kit for front of house, the back office solutions must have a some goodness about them too...
Great products like Rumpus FTP server also made a Mac server environment a dream for the users and administrators alike. Sure you can run any of these products on anything from a Macbook air up to a Mac Pro but the problem is would you feel confident in doing so now?
Knowing that you'd need to dedicate a lot of extra space to keep the same setup running. Invest in more machines to guarantee the uptime that the Xserve facilitates by having hot swappable parts, dual PSU's and the LOM card. Will Apple be releasing a mac mini and mac pro spares kit? Would you feel confident if there was a hardware failure that you could swap a part in moments and before things became a massive issue for your users.. Or will you have to send any faulty product off to be repaired or wait for an Apple Care person to come out. Thus leaving your company up the creek?
Personally I don't like the idea of having to go to work late at night to press a button to turn something on or reset it should their be an issue. I don't like the idea of migrating back to a platform i've spent the last few years migrating away from..
I'll get another 3years plus out of my current setup, that much I can take for granted. Maybe in such time my company wont exist and this will be a moot point for me.. If on the other hand we are doing well and want to expand a bit, do I need to be tripping over Mac Pro towers in my already cramped server room.. Do I want to be adding a mac mini into any mission critical role? No I don't...
All I want is to be able to offer my users and other potential customers a solid solution, on a solid platform like OSX server, running on solid hardware like the Xserve or a viable alternative..... Which if there is one they are being silly by not making it known...
It's not really too much to ask is it.. It's not like Apple are short of money. Heck for all I care get Asus or another manufacturer to build a chip as chips offering that rack mounts, offers redundancy and runs OSX server with similar performance to the mac pro. Ship it in a brown cardboard box with none of the Apple spit and polish, no problem i'll buy it or let us build our own.....
BTW over on Appleinsider there are over 300 comments.. So there are obviously a few more annoyed people out there..
I'm going to get off my soap box and try and enjoy the weekend hope you all do too..
Beatle -
Nov 6, 2010 9:23 AMby Kevin Smith4,A few more I can't resist throwing in:
--The Mac Pro is not Optimus Prime and is not going to transform into a dual power supply, LOM, 1 or 2 U rack mountable unit.
--They are not going to "come to their senses" and start selling Xserves or anything like it again.
--They do not have some other next-great-thing solution in mind that will come in to play down the road. In fact, they do not even have some-other-thing solution in mind. They have we-don't-do-this-anymore-period in mind.
--They are not going to work on development of Mac OS X Server at a level acceptable for enterprise.
Message was edited by: Kevin Smith4 -
Nov 6, 2010 9:32 AMby CMD,beatle,
You're taking me the wrong way. I'm rolling my eyes at Apple, too. This is a gut-bomb at anyone who invested a ton of time and effort in getting their company to agree to invest a bunch of money into the Xserve. It's a big black eye on Apple, and it effectively means they will never again be trusted in the enterprise market. Before a couple of days ago, the vast majority of enterprise never really took Apple seriously in that market, but at least there was a passing respect for their products and they did offer a reasonable solution for those who wanted to go that route. Cutting the Xserve market off at the knees like this, though, burned a bridge for all time in that market. No one in their right mind would ever again trust Apple's commitment or support for enterprise so long as Jobs is leading the company. There seems to be no value in totally alienating a market like that. I can't imagine the Xserve was a big drain on Apple's finances, after all. It would have cost them nothing to keep offering it and at least keep that door cracked open. Now that the door is slammed shut, it won't reopen no matter how badly Apple wants to get back into that market. That's kinda dumb, but no company is perfect - Apple makes great stuff, but there's no denying they've stepped on the old crank more than once in their history, and this is just the latest example.
Message was edited by: cmdpilot -
Nov 6, 2010 9:45 AMby beatle20359,I wasn't having a pop at you Cmdpilot.. I figure you're in the same boat as a lot of us... Just 4,000 views in 24 hours on the Xserve support page is unheard of so didn't think it was falling on deaf ears at all.
We all have a choice... Stay quiet and justify the decision or voice our concerns and try our best to get it changed. I'd rather try my best to get things reversed even if it turns out to be a massive waste of time.... Lets face it, it'll hardly cost Steve the fuel for his private jet to keep the xserve development going.
Have a good weekend
Beatle -
Nov 6, 2010 3:33 PMby macintoshxsandaddy,I have to agree with beatle20359's comment.
"We all have a choice... Stay quiet and justify the decision or voice our concerns and try our best to get it changed. I'd rather try my best to get things reversed even if it turns out to be a massive waste of time.... Lets face it, it'll hardly cost Steve the fuel for his private jet to keep the xserve development going."
Let's all make an effort to let apple know that this will have a big impact on the security of our jobs and our livelihoods.
See you all on Monday. -
Nov 6, 2010 5:30 PMby Theo_Stauffer,Just a small heads up cmdpilot: Apple doesn't actually use OSX Server or the XServe internally. They use an eclectic mix of AIX on IBM, Red Hat and Windows on HP (and even Dell iirc) and Oracle on what used to be Sun machines.
I too would love to hear Apple's response to the question of what all the people who used XServes in data centers, but to be brutally honest, this is so typically Apple, and affects such a small percentage of their users (i.e. there won't be major news drama like there was with the iPhone 4 dropped calls debacle) that there probably will be no response. They simply don't care.
I am also pretty certain that there will be no magic solution around the corner. Apple might introduce some big cloud services thing with their new datacenter, but that will almost certainly be targeted at consumers, like everything else at Apple is.
The problem behind all of the problems that Apple causes is also its salvation, i.e. Steve Jobs. His monomaniacal attention to product detail is what produces such brilliant products but that same focus means that anything that isn't within his current focus gets seriously neglected. He just isn't interested, and since he runs the company like his own fiefdom, there will be no internal challenges to this or any other decision.
Apple could easily enough allow OSX Server to run on other hardware within a certain set of supported components and just as easily allow OSX Server to run in a VM and enter the modern server world, but, again, to be honest with myself, if they had been planning to do that, they would have announced it already.
I'm not sure but I think this also means the end of the road in the long term for Apple's pro software products like FCP, FCPserver, XSan etc. An Apple representative on the Xsanity forums made a statement to the effect that Apple is committed to XSan and OSX Server, but (and I'm speculating here), I think that's just damage control to prevent a mass flight from Apple's customers in the video and media industry, which certainly would give Apple a terrible black eye in the eyes of professionals (as if this hasn't already).
But, to wrap up my bitter post, I'm giving Apple one week to announce a reasonable alternative and not the insult that the Mac Pro and Mac mini are. Then I have to finalise my budget for next year and any decision will certainly be made to transition away from Apple in the long term.
