Finally, an update to the blog. Actually, you should be getting another update after this shortly (within the next couple of days).
I think I’ll need to chuck a disclaimer here too. I’m not bashing Apple here. I actually love my Apple products.
Anyway, with the new release of various Mac’s today, I was checking out the store specing up a new $30,000 Mac Pro (I can dream okay), and started having a look at the Xserve’s that Apple offer and it struck me as strange, what problem does this product solve?
To me, it seems like a solution looking for a problem. But what is it really? It’s an Apple server (based on Intel hardware) with their server operating system which (which is based on FreeBSD) with the Apple tax on top of it (I actually hate that term, to me it’s the quality of the build/components/support that make up that tax – most of which are either covered by buying server components, or not needed as you won’t get support for your server software anyway).
Now if you need to run some type of server, why not build it out of regular server components (I’m talking Xeon, ECC RAM, etc. here), or buy a much cheaper one with the same spec from Dell/HP/whatever. Then chuck FreeBSD or Linux on it and pretty much have the same result (I haven’t done any deep research, but to me it seems like all the Apple specific protocols would already be supported).
A 1U rack server is likely to be headless and the apps shouldn’t need to have a UI (command line is more than enough for server apps), so running Mac OS X Server seems like you’d be wasting CPU time for no benefit. Objective C is also already supported on Linux/BSD too (and has been for years).
Now, back in the PowerPC days, I can almost understand the use for this (although there’s been PowerPC builds of Linux for ages, but they don’t seem as well developed/supported as x86 ones), but since swapping to Intel, I really can’t seem to find a use for it.
If anyone can enlighten me on this, do so in the comments.
