“Apple’s new Mac Pro has high-end workstation users drooling, but others are eying the diminutive powerhouse as the successor to the old Xserve Mac server,” John Rizzo reports for MacWindows. “And Apple appears to have given an oblique blessing to at least one company who has figured out how to rack-mount the 10-inch Mac Pro cylinders. But how well suited is the Mac Pro to function a server?”
“The new Mac Pro offers a processor used in servers by Dell and other server makers, doesn’t generate a lot of heat, and sits in a diminutive 10-inch by 6-inch cylinder. You could fit 9 new Mac Pros in the space taken up by 3 Xserves, roughly one-third of the space. But how would you store them in a rack?” Rizzo reports. “A Mac mini hosting company, MacStadium, has come up with a solution. Their rack holds 270 Mac Pros in 12 square feet of floor space — more server power than could typically be housed in the same space with conventional server hardware. So far, MacStadium is only offering to host or collocate Mac Pros at its facilities, and hasn’t yet made the rack available.”
“The rack will mount the Mac Pro cylinders are their side and cool them with a horizontal flow of air. This is at odds with the way Apple has demonstrated the Mac Pro’s design, which has a central shaft through which air rises to cool the cylinder, with heat escaping at the top,” Rizzo reports. “Last week, Apple seemed to settle this question by quietly posted a tech support document called “Using the Mac Pro (Late 2013) on its side” that blesses to MacStadiums’ Mac Pro rack-mounting strategy…”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]