Where are all the Apple Servers going?

In the last week we have seen Apple discontinue the Xserve product range. During the first months of 2008 it was announced that Apple is XRaid was to be discontinued. It is highly likely that Apple's Mac Mini Server has caused the demise of the Xserve product range during the last two years. Apple have stated that the Mac Mini Server is their bestselling server product at the moment. We at iSOS can vouch for that as we've purchased a ton of them for our clients.

If you need something with more power, the other alternative to the Mac Mini Server is the Mac Pro and a copy of OS X Server. As the noise levels of a Mac Pro are significantly lower than an Xserve this solution is preferred for an small to medium sized office environment. However what do we install if the solution requires the server to be deployed at a data centre where all units are rack mounted and where space in a rack is charged at premium rates? Well, there are rack mounting kits for both the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini Server, but neither of these machines maximise value of the rack space being taken.

One rumour, suggests that Apple will be requiring all the Xserves they can get their hands on to power the so-called iDataCenter. Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina, is expected to provide the back-end for a larger move into cloud computing. Perhaps all the services we are used to using Xserves for, such as website, e-mail hosting, file services and collaboration tools, will be deployed in the upcoming release of Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) as a virtualised sharing platform.

Apple are good at recognising an opportunity when it is presented to them. In this case the extraordinary amount of Mac Mini Servers flying off the shelves. Furthermore, Apple will be the only company to have, from the ground up, built the servers that power a datacenter that provides the world with a global computing platform.

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