Apple XServe; who are these actually aimed at?

mosfet · 2 Nov 2009 at 19:56

I mostly use Macs both at home and at work, but I can't seem to understand the point of the XServe range.

Unlike desktops/laptops where you're paying a premium for industrial design/user interface (save the arguments for another thread

), the XServe doesn't seem to justify the extra price and lack of bulk discounts that HP, Dell and so on can afford to throw at customers.

They're too big and expensive for SOHO serving (especially with the new Mac Mini Server), and are more expensive than equivalent Mac Pro configs if you need an Apple-software-specific render farm.

So, who are these aimed at? Does anyone here use them?

J.B · 2 Nov 2009 at 20:12

I cant say (in my relatively brief time in the industry) I've ever seen or heard of one being used. I imagine there is some ultra trendy 3D CGI company somewhere that does.

#Chri5# · 2 Nov 2009 at 20:39

SpliceCom offer a software IP PBX on the XServe platform.

Ye gads though, it's expensive (both HW & SW).

mdjmcnally · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:06

I've been too a company that had racks of them. They had a large mac user base and were using OSX Server to do the management and provide network services too them.

bigredshark · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:45

That's the primary use, medium sized companies who're primarily mac based and want to use OSX for their management and network services, at the end of the day it's also a absolutely functional apache and mysql server. I know of a few design types who wanted to colo a server and went for an xserve as they know the OS and it's the easiest thing for them.

It's also a popular choice for render farms, might be more expensive than a mac pro but I can't imagine you'll get more than 6 mac pros in a rack, you'll likely get 30 or so xserves easily...

dave-lew99 · 2 Nov 2009 at 22:54

bigredshark said:
It's also a popular choice for render farms, might be more expensive than a mac pro but I can't imagine you'll get more than 6 mac pros in a rack, you'll likely get 30 or so xserves easily...

I saw an article a while ago about using the Mac Mini for rendering - you can get about 6 or 8 into 2U of space (or thereabouts)

bigredshark · 3 Nov 2009 at 19:54

dave-lew99 said:
I saw an article a while ago about using the Mac Mini for rendering - you can get about 6 or 8 into 2U of space (or thereabouts)

You can get a fair few in, I've seen a few racks with shelves full of mini's on their side. If you wanted to do it on the cheap then it'd be an option, until recently though the CPU and memory has been too low end for really professional render nodes though... (and still is probably, I imagine professional render farms are on quad core blades with 16GB+ of RAM these days)

dave-lew99 · 3 Nov 2009 at 20:05

Thinking about it though, even though you have to buy a lot more Mac Mini's is it cheaper per unit of processing power? You just end up having more nodes but at a less cost.