Sam OliverOn Tuesday, CNNMoney.com profiled the reactions of Xserve customers, which the publication referred to as "a mix of confusion and frustration." Those who spoke out on the subject suggested that Apple is out of touch with its enterprise customers, who need stability in their products.
"With consumers, when they don't hear anything and then all the sudden — ta da! — they get a new iPhone, that's great," said John Welch, IT director at the Zimmerman Agency. "For us IT guys, that's a nightmare. We hate that."
Apple announced in early November that it will discontinue the Xserve after Jan. 31, 2011. It has suggested that customers switch to either a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server, or the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server.
Xserve purchases made through Jan. 31, 2011, including the 160GB, 1TB and 2TB models, will be backed by Apple's full one-year warranty. But Apple has also noted that the 12-core mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server meets or exceeds the performance of the baseline Xserve hardware.
An e-mail allegedly sent by Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said that "hardly anyone" was buying the Xserve. And researchers at IDC said that Apple's share of the total server market is less than 4 percent.
Despite enterprise customers' frustration over the cancelation of the Xserve, most said they will keep to the Mac platform for both desktops and servers. CNNMoney.com noted that in a survey of 1,200 Xserve customers, 70 percent said the cancelation of the Xserve will not change their preference toward Apple computers.
"Even when they're frustrated, Apple's enterprise clients still trust the company enough to keep relying on it," author David Goldman wrote. "Apple may always be a niche player in the business market, but it's got an advantage rivals like Microsoft and HP can only dream about: In the eyes of many customers, Apple can do no wrong — even when it does something wrong."
For more, see AppleInsider's three-page postmortem on the Xserve: Why Apple axed Xserve, and how it can reenter the server market.
-m.jpg)
Oliver Haslam
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
-xl-(1)-m.jpg)
51 Comments
Bull. You can't possibly say anything about that a month after Apple ditched Xserve. Biased, lame article.
But Apple has also noted that the 12-core mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server meets or exceeds the performance of the baseline Xserve hardware.
Yes and it fits in the rack nicely too. One of the reasons the XServes were so attractive for our cluster was the 1U design.
Yes and it fits in the rack nicely too.
You can mount a Mac Pro sideways in a rack and it uses 3U, the Mac Pro is more powerful anyhow. The only thing the XServe offers over the Mac Pro is the optional redundant Power supply, the Mac Pro has more internal hard disk storage, and faster CPU availability.
Not to say I'm not sorry to see it go, I've installed a number of them myself and am a huge fan. Most of these customers won't be worried about replacing or upgrading these units for YEARS.
I can see Mac OS X Server being offered as a Virtualized solution in the near future anyway. Anyone that does a lot of enterprise solutions know that Virtualization is a preferred method for this, it saves money on hardware and energy if you can run 4-8 virtuals on a server that might cost as much as two pieces of server hardware it saves a lot of overhead.
You can mount a Mac Pro sideways in a rack and it uses 3U, the Mac Pro is more powerful anyhow. The only thing the XServe offers over the Mac Pro is the optional redundant Power supply, the Mac Pro has more internal hard disk storage, and faster CPU availability.
Apple towers have not been horizontally rackable since the death of the G4, and lord knows i've tried. There are also substantial cooling issues with placing a unit as shallow as a Mac Pro in a 30" deep rack. You also make the omission of a redundant power supply sound trivial, and fail to mention the lack of a server grade NIC with LOM. Who would hang a business off an infrastructure that is so ill-equipped for its purpose?
Virtualization is already an option for OS X Server, but only on top of a Mac host. Which Mac are you going to use to run a bunch of VM's? THe only candidate is the Xserve, or a hackintosh server.
My clients will be scrapping OD, switching to AD with extended schema, phasing out XSan, looking at alternatives to Final Cut Server/D.A.M. and migrating anything in the server room we can to RHEL. Between this and the crappy graphics card support, it's one less reason to be able to argue keeping the Mac platform. When asked why to buy the Mac for a business, I could spew for five minutes reason after reason, separated with "AND's". Now I'm out of arguments in under a minute, and they are all separated with "BUT's". This, coming from a die-hard Apple fan for more than 20 years.
Yes and it fits in the rack nicely too. One of the reasons the XServes were so attractive for our cluster was the 1U design.
I don't believe that is a legitimate argument. Bottom line was. apple didn't have a compelling family. They needed blades and a 2U enclosure for hardware, and some significant networking, storage, and management upgrades.
Looking at Fujitsu's new blade line-up, it is pretty clear Apple didn't have a modern breadth, ESPECIALLY for clusters. (Fujitsu having lagged in this market in the past, with IBM dominating.)