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52 Comments
- Emachine, on 02/14/2009, -8/+41Who actually uses mac servers?
- gcnaddict, on 02/14/2009, -4/+28I've been working with Podcast Producer over the last four months and I think it's utter crap. It doesn't log errors properly and requires far too much of an investment of time just to get it up and running. It also requires too many unnecessary services to be running (like Open Directory) just to process a simple job.
In addition, Leopard Server doesn't shut off unnecessary UI bits. It's running on unix for crying out loud. Why can't the UI be a totally voluntary option on a server OS? Even with Windows, the UI is only drawn when something is updated, but the UI is always refreshed in OS X Server.
It also kernel-panics infinitely more often than other Windows boxes I've used (read: I haven't had one Windows Server box bluescreen on me. Feel free to divide by zero).
Overall, Apple's server tools suck, and until they fix the above problems, I'm not investing my time into it anymore. - PopcornArsonist, on 02/14/2009, -4/+21No one really uses OS X Servers for Websites, etc, but they are pretty fantastic for administering groups of Macs. In fact, for companies with large numbers of Macs, I'd say an Apple server is almost crucial.
- hardeep1singh, on 02/14/2009, -6/+20That's exactly what I wanted to write.
- Jibberish, on 02/14/2009, -9/+21Apple makes servers?
- techdever, on 02/14/2009, -1/+6iHate?
- digitalpencil, on 02/14/2009, -2/+6The closest Dell match I could find for the xserve was a Poweredge 1950III.
Spec'd as close to the same:
Poweredge: Quad Xeon (E5430) 2.66GHZ, 12MB L2, 1333MHZ.
2GB 667MHZ DDR2 (4x512MB) & a 73GB SAS, 15K RPM. No OS. ($4,274)
Xserve: Quad Xeon (E5462) 2.8GHZ, 12MB L2, 1600MHZ.
2GB 800MHZ, DDR2 (2x1GB) & the same 73GB SAS ADM 15K RMP. OS X. ($3,099)
Now admittedly the racks aren't identical, the 1950III can take 64GB RAM whereas the xserve can only take 32GB RAM. The Xserve can however take an extra TB of storage (3TB/2TB) so it kinda levels out.
I've not put any add-ons for either but tried to match them as closely as possible in architecture and specs excepting that the Dell doesn't come preloaded with an OS. With over a $1000 difference and a faster harpertown though, the xserve is coming up trumps.
As I said, I know it's difficult to comprehend with mac PCs coming in so much higher than the competition but they purposefully price their servers very aggressively to attempt to take the enterprise market by the only way possible, the wallet. I'm not very well up on the subject but a friend admins large Flash comm grids and apparently use them for server-side video processing (can't remember what it's called, kinda like FFMPEG/Mencoder but propitiatory) says they're ridiculously quick, very easy to admin and significantly cheaper than alternatives. - Zippo, on 02/14/2009, -1/+5We run an Xserve at my office, managing the 20 Macs and a 4TB RAID storage server.
Also planning on implementing a font server, since we use several thousand typefaces. - drunkenoaf, on 02/14/2009, -0/+4IF you're not administering lots of Macs, probably not.
- sondunoneblood, on 02/14/2009, -0/+4theres a lot of companies and schools that use mac servers, they usually have a few to admin there mac's, manage prefs etc. I don't think there are any large companies that operate entirely on mac servers, but you will find a few scattered here and there.
- MacEnvy, on 02/14/2009, -2/+6You guys are all missing the reason it's actually cheaper - the Server OS licensing. You can get an XServe running Leopard Server with a license for unlimited client connections much, much cheaper than the same machine with Windows Server 2008. It's a huge cost difference that heavily tilts the advantage toward XServe for small IT shops or large ones that can make due with a mixed-OS environment.
- digitalpencil, on 02/14/2009, -5/+8xserves were always priced lower than competing rackmounts so Apple could edge into the enterprise market.. they bowed out of the storage game after they ceased production of the xserve raid but their server hardware is renown for being easier to manage than *nix and cheaper than Windows. i think their entry-level xserve is under $3000 whereas you're looking at over $4000 for a same-spec build off someone like Dell.
- digitalpencil, on 02/15/2009, -1/+4should i have just said '***** apple'?
- RogerMcDodger, on 02/14/2009, -2/+5He didn't say that at all.
- MattBD, on 02/14/2009, -0/+2@MacEnvy
I've found the same. Once you've grasped how to use tab to autocomplete in bash it's very quick to navigate files and folders, to the point that I hardly ever use a file manager in either Linux or OS X. Only today I've been programming in Python on Windows and it's far more laborious than using the terminal in Ubuntu or OS X.
Plus, Unix pipes in particular are an extremely powerful tool whose functionality is very hard to emulate in a GUI. You can search within a folder, but it's often quite slow. Recently I was checking out OpenBSD and I wasn't sure what the name was for the CD drive, so I ran ls /dev | grep cd | less to grab a list of the devices in /dev, filter out the ones with cd in their names, and present them in a list I could page up and down in. It would be very hard to recreate this kind of functionality in a GUI. - digitalpencil, on 02/14/2009, -2/+4^ don't really know what 'special pricing' entails but for a HP 1U rack (DL160) with the same 2.8 Xeon E4562, 2GB RAM and the same 73GB SAS drive you're still looking at $2,497 before warranty.
Still cheaper than the XServe but once you factor in warranty and the staggering cost of WS'08/RHEL/SuSE, you're still trailing WAY behind the xserve.
Macs are expensive, their servers are cheap.. it's just the way it is. They can afford to accelerate costs of PCs but enterprise only really cares about how much it costs so their servers are very competitively priced, always have been.. - MacEnvy, on 02/14/2009, -1/+3For anyone in the enterprise market, the console (or terminal) is extremely fast and powerful for scripting, cron jobs, and any number of other aspects. I find it faster often than pulling up a gui app and clicking boxes. I can do the same thing in one command line in a few seconds. When dealing with things like file permissions, ownership, etc it's WAY faster to pull up a terminal window and type a single line than to open Nautilus/Finder/whatever, find the file, open the properties, fix the permissions, and apply and close.
Any experienced server admin will tell you the same. - booyahbitch, on 02/14/2009, -4/+6I guess they will be only 2-3 years behind a Linux server now...imagine that.
- bilbus, on 02/15/2009, -0/+2and you would use a server when?
- arbulus, on 02/16/2009, -0/+2How is babby formed?
- JohnnySoftware, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1OS X is based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD had IPv6 support before any other operating system.
Sounds like you are at least 5 years off the mark.
OS X 10.6 grabbed latest versions of the most popular scripting languages. Came with latest version of Java (Java 6) too. What do you want it to come with - code from the future? - JohnnySoftware, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Cloud computing is software as a service. If you are using a lot of proprietary APIs and depending on a particular operating system, you're doing it wrong.
- drunkenoaf, on 02/14/2009, -0/+1I like Safari, but it's the least stable of Apple's apps. : /
- JohnnySoftware, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Ec2 is Amazon. Amazon uses Linux. They ditched their MS-Windows because the licenses made the computers too expensive and Linux was easier to administrate en mass.
About when they switched from MS-Windows to Linux is when Amazon become profitable, by the way. - InCider, on 02/17/2009, -0/+1Then you have to add thousands of dollars for Microsoft Windows, and Client Access Licenses. Enough CALs for 100 users to do simple ***** costs more than the hardware. Do some research.
- inactive, on 02/14/2009, -3/+4meh... underwhelming
- JohnnySoftware, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1I've worked around a fair bit of custom IT software. IT software can be broken down into a few groups:
1. Stillborn - it never gets finished, it never gets accepted by production, or it never gets used.
2. Thriving - it actually gets finished, accepted, and works. Lives a few years - success!
3. Long lived - runs longer than most people have careers. SSA is often used as an example of this. Such systems are quite rare.
The truth of it is that most systems fall into category 1 or 2.
Changing regulations, annoying defects, hardware changes, and steadily increasing OS incompatibilities, SQL changes, plus web standards evolution keep IT software development on an endless march.
Lots of software is getting tossed out now because it only works with IE6. IE6 was broken, incompatible with web standards, and its HTML/CSS is not even supported by Microsoft now. Now is actually an ideal time to switch to Macs.
Macs come with Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java. Why would you want to pay 2 to 10 times as much to work on insular, proprietary, one off languages/tools when you can work with technologies created by a bigger, smarter ecosystem? - gblackbox, on 02/14/2009, -3/+4Of course many organizations across the globe utilize Apple's Xserve offerings.(My SMB of ~100 employees being one of them, 60% Win / 40% Mac users.)
While the initial purchase price isn't the absolute best bargain to be found, after you factor end of life, ease of use, and unlimited client access licenses, it's the best bang for the buck.
For a mixed environment such as ours it's the right tool for the job. - macuser, on 02/14/2009, -0/+1Linux users know about poontang? ; )
- JohnnySoftware, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Macs have Unix under their skin. Their GUI is better than Unix's. Fast at rendering 2D and 3D, has standard way to render fonts, do anti-aliasing, etc. Unix/Linux, not so much so.
OS X comes with administration/monitoring tools. They have a nice GUI and monitoring is something you do not want to have to do using a glass TTY interface.
If the ads on the radio are right, then people have to pay a Windows server operator $70K. He has to pay thousands of dollars for courses learn how to configure the Windows server. And the courses become outdated several years later and he has to do it again. Plus, patch Tuesdays are a nightmare for Windows networks. The facts Macs are easy to use probably helps everybody out compared to the way things are with Windows server.
Linux/Unix has some great tools for monitoring the network and diagnosing things. It can be a little more complicated to go and pick out the mix of tools you think you need, even if you can get them for free. Apple has done that for you and filled in the holes with some tools of their own that only come with Mac OS X servers. Apple has been creating easy to use software for 30 years so they know what they're doing.
Enterprise server versions of Linux are not exactly cheap if you get them from a big company like Red Hat. Ditto Sun's full fledged enterprise Unix. Apple's OS is competive with them.
Apple's OS is pretested on their hardware too. You know OS X is going to run on the Mac it comes with. With Linux and buitl-it-yourself Windows boxes, you don't. Also, once a Windows box is a few year old you don't really know if that next version of Windows is going to work on it until you try it. - bilbus, on 02/15/2009, -0/+1Come on, every it department have a mac server .. oh wait nevermind
- alent1234, on 02/14/2009, -2/+3$4000 for a server? better include 32GB of RAM. we have HP where I work and after our special pricing they are dirt cheap.
HP's server support is pretty good too. they always have parts onsite the next morning.
their servers are so cheap it doesn't even make sense to buy extended warranties past 3 years for them. if it breaks just buy a new server. too bad they seem to last so long. we have 10 year old Compaq servers and we can still get parts. - JohnnySoftware, on 10/31/2009, -0/+1Mac OS X for Snow Leopard is cheaper.
1. Windows Server 2008 costs almost $1500 for a rinky dink 5 user license.
2. OS X 10.6 Server costs $499 and it is an unlimited user license.
3. OS X 10.6 Server w/ Mac Mini running it costs grand total of $999.
MS-Windows 2008 is wildly overpriced and astonishingly limited. - booyahbitch, on 02/14/2009, -1/+1:o) Yeah, that's like saying "Well I guess poontang is good for something!"
- atbnet, on 02/14/2009, -3/+3You can get a Dell server with a Xeon or Opteron for under $1000. Xserves are really expensive.
- pentiumii, on 02/15/2009, -1/+1I read alot the comment and alot people keep saying mac server r cheaper
and companies only care about coast
Wel if the above is true how come hardly any one uses mac severs
Apple is a control junkie and whether the upfront coast is cheaper or not most major companies are not willing to pay to do every thing apple ways
i mean IT not going to want to have to jailbreak his severs just to run some apps
the other reason software
most major corporation have in house software they payed to have develop just for them
there not going to wanted to pay to have them tools recoded and ported to mac
and the last reason is UNIX
UNIX by it self is all ready a great sever environment that it hugely flexible and scalable to whether your needs are to be honest there nothing apple can bring to the table that Unix by self doesn't already
so if u factor in the coast of retrain,having software ported over and having to give up some freedom to apple it not really worth it companies to switch to an apple sever environment - adriankeith, on 02/14/2009, -4/+4$4000 for a same-spec build from dell? entry level servers are now in the 1000s. Those prices you're quoting are probably from 3-4 years ago. servers are so much more affordable these days. what's not really affordable are NAS devices but the entry level servers are so cheap now.
- bilbus, on 02/15/2009, -1/+1Are you kidding .. you can get a dell 2950 with 8gb and 6tb for under 3k.
- rpeters, on 02/14/2009, -4/+3Our company does and they are awful. They crash or have issues weekly, literally. It's embarrassing. And they're only using it as a friggin file server!
- chadadams, on 02/14/2009, -9/+8I have two, count them two OS X servers at my workplace, one is a storage server for graphic design files, and version cue hosting. The other runs "test sites" of PHP, CGI, and JSP sites, the reason for that is OS X server is way better to use than Debian, and doesn't have the headaches involved with Windows Server.
Is it going to beat the other servers in the market place, no. Is it a nice treat for a sys admin, yes. - MattBD, on 02/14/2009, -6/+5Is there actually any good reason for using this over a free Linux distro? I've been tinkering with Ubuntu Server and I find that pretty easy to set up and use, and while I've been using Linux for about two years now I'm no great *nix guru.
As far as I can see the only major advantages OS X Server has over Ubuntu Server is the "real Unix" thing and the fact that it comes with a GUI by default. Canonical offer commercial support, so that's not an issue, and if you need a GUI you can easily install one, or use Webmin. Plus there's the whole issue of having to run it on Apple's hardware, and that restricts your choices. And quite frankly, if you're administering a *nix server of any kind and you can't use the terminal, what are you doing in that job? - rd1010, on 02/14/2009, -3/+1The terminal is necessary in some cases but I think that a GUI should be used whenever possible.. this ins't 1995 anymore.. things have evolved a bit and programming and setting up servers doesn't have to consist of just typing cryptic does into a terminal. Now I fully realize that it is a necessary aspect of server administration for many things but there is a lot you can do now within a GUI, especially if you are using a CMS like Drupal.
Also, its extremely easy to take Ubuntu server and add gnome to it.. "apt-get insall ubuntu-desktop" and you're done. I just set up a slicehost Ubuntu machine with gnome desktop and I can access it via freenx - rd1010, on 02/14/2009, -5/+2With so many developers (myself included) moving entirely to the cloud for hosting.. I am wondering is this Mac server going to be made available for a cloud environment like Ec2 or slicehost? I would find it a bit amusing if Apple was that "out of the loop" to overlook the growing number of cloud users, I see even Windows is available on Ec2 now, made me throw up a little bit when I saw that
- macuser, on 02/14/2009, -8/+4Well, it's nice to know Linux is good for something after all....
- inactive, on 02/14/2009, -19/+14mac server? comedy!
- hardeep1singh, on 02/14/2009, -10/+5Crucial? So you mean Macs don't work with real servers?
- inactive, on 02/14/2009, -18/+13Whenever I ask why Macs aren't popular in the corporate world, I just point towards OS X Server. It's a complete joke.
- hardeep1singh, on 02/14/2009, -23/+18Mac Servers??
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha - inactive, on 02/14/2009, -10/+5It just works!
- hardeep1singh, on 02/14/2009, -10/+5I hate all apple stuff that starts with an i.
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