Apple have discontinued the Xserve completely. Their suggested alternatives are install OSX Server on a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini Server?

Neither the Mac Pro or Mac Mini Server are rackmountable. You just stick them on a shelf and call it a day. The Mac Pro takes up a massive amount of space because you can only fit two of them into 12U on a shelf.

I guess not enough people bought the Xserves to warrant Apple having it as a standalone product line. They already killed off the Xserve RAID units a couple years back.

I know some people who have racks full of Xserves doing rendering. They're not going to be thrilled about this decision by Apple but I guess they'll just have to put up with the big Mac Pros or port their software to something else if possible.

The majority of their server users (SMB) will find a Mac Mini or Mac Pro a suitable alternative, especially since most probably don'e even have a server rack on site.

Enterprise is pretty much where it is important to have rack mountable servers, and this is an area Apple continues to choose to devote very little resources to. Well, outside their push for the iPad and iPhone. As you pointed out, I guess the amount of companies interested in OS X Server in a rackable unit is too low for Apple to care about now.

Server wise, the XServes were usually pretty far behind the rest of the 1U market. No option for better 2.5 inch enterprise drives, SAS as a "3rd party option", and no redundant fan options kept it from being a serious 1U box. And since they only used Xeon processors, they lacked the ability to compete price wise with the cheeper low end 1U servers from other vendors.

This does make me wonder what hardware Apple is using in their own data center out in North Carolina. Hackintosh servers? :-)

Probably Linux boxen, like everywhere else.

I think Apple have made a smart move. From a hardware perspective, their X-Serves were just too high quality in fit and finish to be sitting hidden in a data room/center somewhere. They carried a premium for that Apple level quality and craftsmanship.

They're finding the consumer space amazingly lucrative and things only look to be getting bigger and better in that space lately. I don't know what they have planned, but I can imagine spending a tiny bit of engineering time on the Apple TV to allow its own App Store and over night taking a huge bite out of the console market. In the long run this is going to bring them a lot more customers and a lot more money than competing in the enterprise server game.

I'm not at all surprised by the news, it always seemed like Apple were simply sticking their toe into the enterprise market as opposed to jumping right in. One question I do have, is where does this leave XSAN on OSX nodes? I wonder if the future solution will be XSAN on the nodes and Stornext on linux servers.

We had a bunch of XServes running our production system, and other than looks and the fact that they ran OSX, they were outclassed in almost every other way by the Dell's and HP's that surrounded them. The majority of which were almost half the price. We shut the old system down, but I still have a pair of them running our playout system. But it's probable they'll get replaced in the next 12 months, by a windows-based system (shudder).

Of course this could be heralding the beginning of the end. I already have a sinking feeling that Apple will be pulling out of the pro video market in the next year or so. My nightmare is that we'll end up in a situation where we have to jailbreak our Apple laptops to run the software that we want. Thank god for Linux!

I felt this coming a few months ago. It seemed pretty clear that the Xserve line was getting much harder to find on store.apple.com.

The fact that they are oriented more to quantity-1 consumer sales and stuff like iTunes and app commissions is nothing new. The lack of stuff like laptop docking stations and crappy iMac ergonomics made it clear that they are not aiming at business customers. iPads? Great idea until you want to buy 1000 of them for a vertical mobile app and have to deal with 1000 AT&T phone bills. Not.

So, what do we say, Arrivederci?

Surely someone in the aftermarket will make a case to mount a Mac pro on a rack (if there's really any money in it).

Maybe style wise, but inside, the fit and finish was below what the HP Proliants normally offer. I can't tell if the 2009 models were any better, but the older units required unscrewing a ton of screws just to get the fans out. The interior was pretty clean though, on par with the higher end servers on the market.

The only reason someone would consider an XServe was to run OS X server. Apple in many cases leads the industry with good computer design, but they simply didn't put as much effort as was needed to properly compete with other rack mount hardware. It's a shame too, I'm sure Apple could have turned out some amazing blade products.


Just call up AT&T business relations. They started offering business plans October 28th. Considering Apple underestimated consumer demand, it probably took a while to ramp up to also be able to meet enterprise demands.


Thats going to be tough, since a Mac Pro case (with non removable handles) is 20 inches tall. So on it's side, it wouldn't fit into a 19 inch rack. Apple says 2 can be placed on a rack shelf, and consume 12U (21 inches) worth of space.

A grinder and a spot of welding should sort that out...

I was referring to the kind of case where you take the guts out and put it in a whole new case. Perhaps with some right angle cards to make it flatter.

Not sure if that's possible since I've never owned a Mac Pro

That would be doable, though probably pricy with recent models. The 2006-2008 ones were pretty normal, with memory riser boards sticking off the motherboard, and connected in via edge connectors on the PCBs. Due to the weight, the case would need some support for them, but not much. The 2009-2010 models would need a better case, as the CPU and memory sit on a separate board perpendicular to the main board, with lots of tiny fragile pins used to connect them.

Could probably make some money back selling the stock Mac Pro case empty to people wanting to stuff normal components inside them.

There are a few companies that make cabinets that have wider "slots" into which to put a Mac Pro sideways, with standard 19" hardware above/below them.

You'd think, though, that if they're going to discontinue the XServe, that they could at least reengineer the Mac Pro case to be less than 19" wide.

19" tall.

Rackmount kits exist for the G5 and Mac Pro enclosures. They even exist for G4/G3 enclosures. I pulled up at least 3 different ones in Google. One of the companies may now have stopped selling their product though.

Seems like a huge space waster compared to 1U chassis though.

Actually, I have been exchanging emails with campus AT&T reps for past two weeks and they are not able to confirm yet that this includes consolidated billing. But I have to believe it will, otherwise we won't be using them. If it happens, thought, it will be AT&T that will have organized the back end of this, not Apple. That's actually understandable, but I still don't think that Apple thinks enterprise.

Another "not enterprise" point: crappy, falsely-lower-initial-price1-year warranty and clunky Applecare extended warranty process (unless purchased from store.apple.com). I have asked AT&T whether they will be directly activating our theoretical 1000-2000 Applecares.

(not sure we will pay that extra $99 per unit given that a lot of the iPad losses could be non-warrantable. So maybe we should just plan on 50 spares).

Wholesale price on Applecare, which you'd likely be able to get, is considerably lower than retail. You can get Applecare on eBay for about 50% of retail in my experience.

To me, the beginning of the end was when Apple quietly dropped support for ZFS, despite having announced it, at the time, as a forthcoming feature in Snow Leopard Server. For this specific reason, I bought myself a Mac Pro, anticipating I could run ZFS across the four internal HD slots. I'm still pretty annoyed at that. Yeah, I could build myself a small OpenSolaris server box and connect everything over GigE, but I was attracted by the single-box solution.

Sigh.