Rebecca sheds a tear for
our beloved Xserves
We have a rack full of various Xserves that power our website and business, so we were deeply saddened when Apple announced a few months ago that they’d no longer be available past January of 2011.
Yes, yesterday was the Xserve’s last day. We never really got to take a moment of silence in honor of these compact and capable enterprise-class servers—and beautiful, let’s not forget how much they classed up a boring server rack—so let’s do so now.
…
Okay, that’s enough of that! While I bemoaned the loss of high-availability features of the Xserve (esp. hot swappable internal storage and redundant power supplies) and the ability to pack that much power into 1U of rack space, all is not lost. We had already begun replacing a number of our aging Xserves with Mac minis when Apple made the fateful announcement.
We find the Mac mini to easily hold its own against an Xserve G5 with a fraction of the power, cooling, and space requirements. This means not only a smaller physical footprint, but a significantly smaller carbon footprint. And our backs and wallets thank us every time we deploy one as well.
We’re not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Macminicolo.net
published their numbers regarding hosting with Mac minis and are in complete agreement. They’ve hosted 1,278 Mac minis over the last 6+ years, most of which are still in their facility. Not too surprising to us is the fact that some of those were installed on day one and are still going strong. Even more impressive though is that only 11 of them have ever required a hardware repair (“5 dead hard drives, 4 dead motherboards, 1 dead power adapter, 1 corrupted memory module”).
And, you know what? They stopped taking in Xserves for colocation a year ago and not a single customer has found switching to a Mac mini to be detrimental. Like us, the ones switching from Xserve G5s saw a net performance gain! Macminicolo.net calculates a $3,777 savings in hardware & colocation costs by going with a Mac mini over an Xserve.
The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server has been an excellent solution for us and we’re glad to see they’re working out well for so many others! Drop us an email if you think a Mac mini (or the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server) might be a fit for your business!