“In the early days at Macminicolo, many customers were glad to have a Mac focused colo company. In addition to their Mac minis, they’d also send in their Xserve for colocation,” Brian Stucki writes for MacStadium. “We had plenty of space so we were happy to bring them in. Also revenue is nice for a new company.”
“As the Mac mini became Apple’s most popular server, we started to phase out the Xserve hosting. These machines were six times the size and way more power hungry than the Mac mini so they weren’t as profitable for us,” Stucki writes. “Here we are in 2017 and we’re bringing back a second life for the Xserve. Since Macminicolo merged with MacStadium, we now have more space and many more options for Mac mini, Mac Pro, and 1U servers like the Xserve. While Mac Pro is definitely our focus, I feel like I owe the Xserve fans an update.”
Stucki writes, “All of our Xserves have the 8Core 2.93GHz processor and 48 or 96GB of RAM…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Xserve lives!
Be sure to check out the cool photos in the full article!
Our Xserver2,1 are still hosting mail and still running strong after 11 years! (We have 2)
The real star of the show here is , Pure Storage. Theyre the best storage in the business!!
Still waiting for a refresh of the mini. I love my dual internal drive unit but it’s getting old!
I wouldn’t count on much of a MacMini refresh. It seems as though each refresh brings a lesser MacMini to users at a higher price. My 2012 16GB quad-core i7 MacMini is probably as powerful as Apple’s best current MacMini.
I really don’t understand why Apple has such a difficult time upgrading components to current industry specs. What gave Apple the idea new users wouldn’t at least consider a quad-core i7 option? Some people could certainly take advantage of the extra threads for an app such as Handbrake especially if they’re using the MacMini for a media-server device like I do.
The 2014 Mac mini was really the only “downgrade”, and that was somewhat debatable. The reason why they had to not offer a QC i7 was because Intel changed the pin-outs and thus the logic board requirements. Apple would’ve needed to have designed a new case for the mini, and they decided not to.
If the mini lives on, I’d imagine the next release to be a full body change. This could go in either of two directions. Either the historical route of being a desktop version of the MacBook Pro 13″ or in a new direction of being the desktop version of the MacBook 12″.
While the WWDC normally doesn’t offer hardware, the mounting pressure for Apple to do something with the mini and Pro as well as other timing makes sense for something to be announced there. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a strategy that plays out with both the mini and Pro such that Apple has a 3 level option for non-AIO desktops.
what a waste of money… i’d hate to see the increase in their power bill once they turn all those hotair blowers on…
power efficient was not on the spec sheet for the xserve.
I used MacConnect years ago (starting in 1996). It was 100% Mac back in the days when virtually no one used Macs for backends. I signed up with them for the two businesses I ran back then even before they went live (signed up in 1995). Then they got really squirrelly, and I pulled the accounts about a dozen years ago.
Mac hosting has always been a niche. It’s nice to see that this niche is surviving.
The XServe was a wonderful beast. Shortly after it started shipping in quantity I was at a confab where the then President of Oracle spoke. He strongly recommended that anyone who wanted to run Oracle should run it on XServes — even an array of XServes for big jobs. His recommendation was not hesitant, conditional, or lukewarm. It was a full on recommendation.
Apple could have owned that market (and any similar market) if Apple had continued to update and upgrade the XServe.
Apple could have had a significant fraction of the high performance computing market too.
Contrast that with today. Macs are very rarely used in any of these instances, and when they are used they are most often done by die hard Mac fans.
I was very disappointed when Apple killed the Xserve. I was also disappointed that Apple failed to develop a blade server architecture to run macOS. These are important pieces of the Apple ecosystem, even if they are a relatively small market that may not directly yield much profit.
macOS is going the opposite direction of server use…
they are closing more and more points of entry for smart people, and dumbing everything down for the masses.
good for making money, not good for doing real sys/dev/ops..
what you want is an AWS account. and some lessons on a real server OS.
Agree completely. Quick question about the last line:
“What you want is an AWS account and some lessons on a real server OS”
Amazon Web Services are what Apple use. Which “real” server OS are you referring to?
Anythining ending in nix.
And no macOS doesn’t count. Its crippleware.
Also you can’t run macOS on AWS anyways.
Apple also has it’s own very large data center, all running on HP hardware running some form of Linux. Not macOS.
Not even Apple uses its own “Server.app” 🙂
http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/06/06/datacenter-equipment-apple/
HP servers. Apple doesn’t eat its own dog food.
https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/06/08/is-icloud-running-on-microsoft-amazon-cloud-services/
Microsoft Azure on AWS..
Brian’s talking about the top-of-the-line, end-of-the-road, 2 x Quad Core 2.93GHz Xeon 5500 ‘Gainestown’ series, unmodified, with maxed-out RAM (48GB for single processors, 96GB for dual). Yay! This is what MDN is for (like it used to be)…
…but once you’ve maxed-out the RAM, where do you go from there?
Happily, the Xserve 3,1 (and Mac Pro 5,1 and 4,1) are a group whose processors can be upgraded, following a 2,1 Firmware update, up as far as the 6 x Core ‘Westlake’ X5690 Xeon processors (130w)! Pretty damn cool (or hot), eh?
If you have a bunch of Xserves — of all generations — and you’re interested, there’s a MacRumors Forum which boasts the entire, currently-known, Mac Pro CPU Compatibility List (which includes the XServe family too), right there at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-cpu-compatibility-list.1954766/
The List is so authoritative that it tests and supersedes previous advice from Apple and Intel.
Even if your XServe wasn’t the top one, the ‘old’ Xeon Xserves have plenty of life in ‘em yet: the MacStadium/MacMiniColo deployment — and the Xserve processor upgrade path — prove it beyond doubt.
Correction: “of all generations” read: Intel Xeon processors
(apologies)
I was expecting to see an Xserve converted to an aquarium with eels or something swimming around. Somewhat disappointed.
The XServe died for no reason other than poor (or nonexistent) marketing.
I work in IT, and was shocked at how many fellow IT professionals (and managers) didn’t even know that Apple made a rack-mount server (and this was several years after it came out, and was on Intel).
I wrote to Apple on a couple of occasions, basically suggesting that it was odd and stupid that with all those Apple Stores all across the world, why was their most business-oriented offering conspicuously absent. No need for ads in PC World, etc…just put a simple rack somewhere in the Apple Store, and have a few XServes and XServe RAID boxes in it, possibly even running the store.
Never happened, obviously….shame. It was a sweet system for the price.
I still run two 3,1 XServes: one (my old file server) runs all my backups and the other runs FileMaker Server. It’s a shame very few (even at Apple apparently) see the value in putting Macs in a data center, both for the business customer and for Apple itself (customer-base wise). Without even a new Pro or Mini for years, I’m terrified they’re jumping out of the computer business altogether. If and when I have to switch my server room to windows, I may as well start moving my clients because I’ll already have to deal with the security and other issues, so why would I take up my time & resources trying to maintain a mixed environment?