What the Xserve EOL means to us...

A salute to the Xserve, now I'm off to think about my career path.

Our board has an emergency meeting tonight after Apple dropped this bomb on us, and they've basically decided that we're also going to transition our 55 Mac clients, 4 XServers and XRAID to Windows and HP/EMC next year.

Apple must be vastly confident of themselves, because they're going to lose a lot of business in schools, media shops, colleges etc.

I'm not quite sure of your logic here - why discontinuing one product forces you to do a complete 180° turn in areas completely unaffected by the XServe, but it's your choice 🙂

No Apple product at all is unaffected by this. Without server support you have nothing. I have promoted and recommended Apple systems for years, that all died today along with all of my confidence in Apple. I am so glad that I am not a 100% Apple guy.

James.

I do not want to get into a flaming session here, and I do hope you're not trolling me, but our logic went something like this:

1. Today, out of the blue, Apple very quietly announced in what is basically a footnote (no media, just a small piece of text on the website), that as of January 31, 2011, there will be no more XServe.

2. Two years ago, Apple did a very similar thing with the XRaid. I suppose the writing was on the wall.

3. As in any company above a certain size, we have to budget new IT purchases for the coming year. We had just budgeted for two new XServes and a Promise Raid.

4. Apple has done this with such short notice that we have been left hanging with very little room to manoeuvre. There was no warning and the only thing we can listen to is to listen to our own gut feeling.

5. Apple has been fighting with Adobe for years over numerous subjects. We depend heavily on Adobe's products for our livelihood. Adobe, in contrast to Apple, is very good about roadmaps on future products, even if they are certainly due much criticism themselves.

6. Apple has recently announced OSX 10.7 Lion, which has the beginnings of the iOS fundamentals in it.

7. Our gut feeling is that sooner or later, Apple will make it at least difficult to run 3rd party software that does not come from the appstore.

8. No disrespect to Apple or their strategy, but the quality of software from the appstore is not enterprise level. You won't get AutoCAD, Maya, Max, Creative Suite level software to fit into that model easily.

9. Apple has deprecated Java. This, barring Oracle producing Java for OSX, will have a major impact on enterprise software.

10. Therefore, we feel we can no longer rely on Apple in the future and are going to have to bite the bullet and over to Windows and Microsoft, which while much less comfortable at least has a far better record in terms of both roadmaps and legacy support.

Message was edited by: Theo_Stauffer

Hi Camelot,

Although the Xserve being discontinued doesn't stop the goodness of using a mac desktop or laptop per se it does bring with it a lot of logistical issues. As an example the server room I have is pretty small, to put the equivalent amount of MacPro's in to replace the Xserves we have would require another rack that I just can't fit in. I could look at consolidating the services I run onto fewer machines but when you have no redundancy available on something like the MacPro or Mini I either have to double up the machines and have a failover of some sort or I have to look at another platform to run our servers on. As it's not currently permitted to run a virtual OSX server on anything but Apple hardware then OSX server becomes a far less attractive option.

It simply comes down to space each server takes up in the rack, time it takes to replace hardware on a server in an acceptable timeframe against the cost of buying CAL's for Windows server or implementing a Linux install on hardware with sufficient power, some form of redundancy and rack mounting options.

As a knock on effect for some of us it makes the Mac as a client machine become a slightly less attractive proposal. Windows Server certainly works ok with the Mac's but it is also a far more costly product than OSX server. Windows client machines on the other hand are a cheaper product to Apple desktops (in most instances) so to keep costs at a respectable level a Mac Mac environment or Windows Windows environment can work out cheaper than a Windows server Mac client set up.

Having a product that you've invested heavily in as a company withdrawn for no known good reason causes you to lose faith in the company that you made the initial investment with. Think about the mammoth xsan installs that some companies have and how adding a new server based on a Mac Pro will really bodge things up if you have the rest of the SAN nice and tidy in a rack.

I use the LOM quite often. We have servers based in remote offices and if there are known power outages or other such events i'll power down the servers and power them on when safe to do so. The LOM and properly configured server monitor can easily let me know when the power is back on etc etc or other problems that might have arisen in the server room, air con failing, clogged fan on the server.. These are things I just wont get from the options Apple presented today. So do I want to have to get a cab in the middle of the night to be able to power on a machine that I've gracefully shut down or have to contact a user to do it for me in a remote office... No i'd much rather do it myself and be able to keep an eye on things. Sure I can use other monitoring software at an added expense but none of them will allow me to power on a mac pro or mini..

Beatle

Theo_Stauffer wrote:
I do not want to get into a flaming session here, and I do hope you're not trolling me, but our logic went something like this:

I hope no one comes on here to flame and we keep these posts high up the list.. Hopefully someone at Apple will take note.

1. Today, out of the blue, Apple very quietly announced in what is basically a footnote (no media, just a small piece of text on the website), that as of January 31, 2011, there will be no more XServe.

It really did come out of the blue and is far too short a period for some of us to get our budgets approved and hardware ordered.

2. Two years ago, Apple did a very similar thing with the XRaid. I suppose the writing was on the wall.

At least then they offered an alternative option in the Promise.. Today just left us with options we had before but had ignored as they didn't fit in.

3. As in any company above a certain size, we have to budget new IT purchases for the coming year. We had just budgeted for two new XServes and a Promise Raid.

I upgraded 2 years ago so will be stuck between a rock and a hard place even sooner.

4. Apple has done this with such short notice that we have been left hanging with very little room to manoeuvre. There was no warning and the only thing we can listen to is to listen to our own gut feeling.

Totally agree with you.. This week i've recommended the xserve as a solution to 2 customers.

5. Apple has been fighting with Adobe for years over numerous subjects. We depend heavily on Adobe's products for our livelihood. Adobe, in contrast to Apple, is very good about roadmaps on future products, even if they are certainly due much criticism themselves.

I work with both and although Adobe open they have done some silly moves like killing off Freehand instead of at least merging it with Illustrator.

6. Apple has recently announced OSX 10.7 Lion, which has the beginnings of the iOS fundamentals in it.

Would look at it as a few extras rather than replacing things as we know them.

7. Our gut feeling is that sooner or later, Apple will make it at least difficult to run 3rd party software that does not come from the appstore.

They wont do that.. The mac eco system wouldn't allow it. Enterprises would find it almost impossible to buy apps in bulk etc. It would see the end of the mac as we know it which would be a very unpopular move.

8. No disrespect to Apple or their strategy, but the quality of software from the appstore is not enterprise level. You won't get AutoCAD, Maya, Max, Creative Suite level software to fit into that model easily.

Yep you are right.. Not every company would have an £18,000 credit limit on their corp visa card to buy 10 copies of CS5.. I wouldn't worry about it becoming the only way of getting software.

9. Apple has deprecated Java. This, barring Oracle producing Java for OSX, will have a major impact on enterprise software.

I would hope Oracle will pick up the mantle here...

10. Therefore, we feel we can no longer rely on Apple in the future and are going to have to bite the bullet and over to Windows and Microsoft, which while much less comfortable at least has a far better record in terms of both roadmaps and legacy support.

You'll get a good 4+ years out of the Xserve's you've budgeted for.. I do hope Apple reverse this decision or propose an acceptable solution soon.. Sticking a stupid banner on the xserve page saying available until the 31st is not the answer. A proper announcement with some recourse for it's enterprise customers is needed..

Message was edited by: Theo_Stauffer

Theo I feel your pain mate and I hope they reconsider.. Good luck..

Beatle

beatle20359 wrote:
You'll get a good 4+ years out of the Xserve's you've budgeted for.. I do hope Apple reverse this decision or propose an acceptable solution soon.. Sticking a stupid banner on the xserve page saying available until the 31st is not the answer. A proper announcement with some recourse for it's enterprise customers is needed..

The thing is that we budgeted for a March/April purchase, not an emergency "buy while stocks last" purchase. I suppose that this means that probably we're going to have arrive at a compromise solution and buy the two XServes, grating as that may be in the light of Apple's actions, and drop the Raid. It also means that we'll have to make sure to get a full set of spares to last us a while as Apple has made no guarantees about the availability of such in the time frame of the Apple Care agreement.

However, our XRaid is also getting long in the tooth and even though it should last us until next year or so, what are the chances or the utility of getting a Promise RAID after the XServes are no longer available.

Personally, I think the best short term solution would be to either get a Windows 2008 server and a license for ExtremeZ-IP, or a Linux machine and a Helios license. That way we would at least be assured of the use of the machine in the medium time frame.

Theo I feel your pain mate and I hope they reconsider.. Good luck..

Beatle

Thanks, mate. I think we're all in a leaky boat here.

Hi Theo,

I can say from personal experience that Helios is good at somethings but a very expensive and potentially time consuming product to administer. I moved away from it in 2007 and haven't regretted it one bit. If they changed their licensing models with separate mac or windows licenses being dropped in favour of a unified client license that would be one thing.

ExtremeZ-IP - you should post on the other thread and ask Lanlord about his experiences..

I take it you are in Germany? I used to work for an advertising agency in Hamburg along with LanLord so we both have experience of Helios and he has ExtremeZ-IP running on a Windows server.

I'm sure you could add the RAID's at a later date and end up with the solution you wanted even if it means there is an end to Apple products being in your server room in a few years.

Hope that helps
Beatle

It means that we have been stabbed in the back.

I'm in Switzerland. While I'm still pretty angry, I'm not in shock this morning any more, thank God. The thing is that we need a transition solution and it won't be a long term thing. If we do use ExtremeZ-IP, then it'll be used for at most two years until we finally get rid of the last of our Macs and will have transitioned all our software to Windows.

We used to use Helios up until 5 years ago, and it wasn't easy to use or administer, but it was a fairly stable solution, thankfully. We might end up going that route while transitioning.

Well, this COULD be part of a reasonable sensible policy…

But for THAT to be the case APPLE should explain it…

I don't work for Apple… But I could suppose OPTIMISTICALLY that…

1) Apples Xserve is starting to get a bit old - we don't dispute that
2) Apple with their 'Massive new Data Centre:
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/02/22/aerial-footage-of-apples-north-carolina-data -center

Might A) Offer some cloud-based services

B) Since this is going LIVE in Dec 2010 ? – We should question WHAT IS IT RUNNING ON ??

-- Seems rather unlikely to be Xserve – If not, then they clearly have experience of 'SOMETHING ELSE'

Once the dust settles on this, we MIGHT find that we end up with OS X Server, capable of running on a MUCH WIDER range of server systems – But these would clearly not be Apple Servers
But instead perhaps HP, IBM, etc – So we could perhaps end up with a choice of maybe 20 or 30 different types of server hardware to choose from – instead of just one… ??

Also if Apple is really going down that route, it's likely (hopeful?) that the new 'Mac OS X Server 10.7'
might be fully virtualizable – under VMWare ESX for instance

It's worth recalling that the CURRENT server SW OSX 10.6.4, is fully virtualizable under Parallels, and "Parallels 4.0 Bare Metal" – But currently only on existing Apple Hardware
(is that a technical limit - or just a EULA issue?)

The main problem so far, is that Apple have failed to offer us an explanation.

I suspect that Apples Xserver is going down a similar path to Apples xserve RAID did…

Very Likely we may end up with MORE CHOICE and better Price / Performance ratios then at present

-- Well – That's the optimistic take on this news…

Of course if Apple actually came out and said this – we would all feel a lot happier
– Instead, right now they have just left a Vacuum on the issue…

It's that Vacuum, more than anything, that people are concerned about…
Leaving people to: <insert your paranoid conclusions here>

The presentation of this issue has for far been BAD…
– It seems that Apple has not really thought about the customer reaction to this…

I can imagine – "it's only a few servers…"

But those are used to leverage many services and management functions
– At present Xserves perform a "Pivotal Role" – Apple is just about to remove that pivot WITHOUT having told us how we should go about replacing it… Hence the concern…

I hope we get a statement from Apple next week about where this is going…
– It COULD actually end up being quite positive…

But it would have been much better if Apple had provided an explanation first…

Now we have to wait and see what Apple have to say…

-- Regards
-- A University; Mac Systems Admin…

It is clearer now than ever, that Apple is moving away from the enterprise-thinking and towards consumer.
The released PDF that "explained" what will happen with the Xserve is nothing but foolish propaganda to use Apple's MacPro and MacMini as servers.
Apple, these machines is definitely NOT an option for serious server installations. Trust me. And I'm afraid too, that we really have to move to Windows servers to be able to build professional server rooms, because non rack machines is not even to think about in many server rooms around the world.
The way Apple leave their most thrust worth professional customers (Apple-server technicians and so on) is not in any way acceptable. If Apple have plans of move away from Xserve, they should at least support the platform for another 5+ years, not just stop the production of spare parts and tell us that there will be support until the stock is out, which could mean in march 2011.
Now I have to be really careful before I even talk about XSAN, OSXServer, PodCast Producer etc etc with my customers. I really don't want to promote Windows servers. But that might be our reality from now on. Unfortunately.

Peter Clarke wrote:
It's worth recalling that the CURRENT server SW OSX 10.6.4, is fully virtualizable under Parallels, and "Parallels 4.0 Bare Metal" – But currently only on existing Apple Hardware
(is that a technical limit - or just a EULA issue?)

It is a EULA issue - as VMware Fusion on the Mac and VMware Workstation on any modern Wintel hardware use a shared codebase it's actually pretty easy to get 10.5 or 10.6 Server running virtualised and completely unmodified on non-Apple hardware, though it is (currently) obviously against the EULA.

Xserve is dead, what is the future of OS X Server? Without viable server hardware what is the point of OS X Server? At a time when iPhone and iPad are making a surge into Enterprise and thus an opportunity for increased Xserve sales should occur, Apple kills a product poised to take off.

The NC data center does not hold any sort of viable alternate solution for the majority of Xserve installs.

The only other Apple announcement that may hint at their thinking is the Unisys announcement in late October. It seemed to be about an Apple mobile devices push into enterprise with Unisys selling and supporting iPhone, iPad and developing custom solutions utilizing those devices. Does Apple intend to pass off OS X Server to run virtualized on Unisys hardware?