Think you know the truth about Mac OS X Server? Find out as Ryan Faas counts down the top ten commonly held myths about Apple's server platform. Warning: while it's a decent article, it will make you click through 10 pages to get the 10 reasons.
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Member since:2007-07-31
I'm not sure I understand your point ... or how relevant it is to my original comment BUT
To "create product differentiation" amongst vendors you'd oh I dont know... create different products?
I'm neither for nor against xserves only being able to do this or that, I just wanted to check it out anyway. You might also wonder why I'm running it on a 450mhz cube... maybe that's because I never bought it?
Apple is changing its strategy now by buying out that semiconducter manufacturer... this will help prevent competitors reproducing x feature on their generic boxes (quicktime on a chip?) but the truth is, since Apple switched from PPC to Intel they have pretty much lost ALL their "product differentiation" to generic IBM compatibles the only thing that is left is the OS and the apple brand name.
In the olden days... manufacturers created better products to create differentiation between competitors.
Now the same OEM makes the same product and gets stamped with a different badge...
A bit like buying compaq ram for £2000 or crucial/micron ram for £200
Same memory... been tested more but your average customer doesn't care... and at £200 you could buy a box and keep some spare.
So... maybe you are right *shrugs* only the xserve head can control/monitor multiple nodes via hardware... but for the majority of people, who the f--k cares? especially when there are scary open source versions of xgrid etc etc.
I'm not saying btw that xserves are crap.... I was almost thinking of buying one but couldn't justify the cost a rack would save spacewise. (I bought a mbp instead) But neither can the majority of large datacentres (most of which house beige box pcs) because real estate since the dotcom bust has made DC space extremely cheap to buy.
Member since:
2005-11-21
It used to be sluggish with the old RVNC but for some reason its actually quite usable now.
My gripe with OSX server is that most of the remote monitoring stuff is reserved for apple xserves... which sucks ass. Am I right you can get a headless attachment for G4/G5 mac pros? maybe that adds that feature back in.
To be fair other than the dashboard widget, most of the remote monitoring software that doesnt work wouldn't be usable outside a rack -- a good chunk of it does.
I did once setup a clustered Xgrid system of different flavours but gave up after I couldnt find anything to run on it other than a sample calculation
1x G4 450mhz cube 1.5GB ram leo server acting as head and then the below as nodes
1x 1.8 ghz athlon XP running windows XP (1GB mem)
1x 2.2 ghz amd FX53 running linux (2GB mem)
1x 2.4 ghz macbook pro (2gb) running leo client
So I'd say that was pretty scalable... another example would be that American Uni that bought an Xgrid of 1024 nodes ... ( I cringe at the thought of that powerbill)
How the hell do you create product differentiation amongst hardware vendors if your own software tools run on competing hardware solutions?
Thinking does a body good.