Apple in the enterprise: client, not server

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Last Friday was a sad day for business users of the Mac platform. Apple announced that, from next January, it will no longer sell the Xserve.

Apple will continue to support its 1U server box until the end of the customer’s warranty. But for anyone wanting a new Mac server, the choices are either a Mac Pro tower, or the server version of the Mac Mini.

The Mac Mini server is a great little box for small businesses, as it is cheap, compact and quiet. At the SoHo end of the market, though, Apple faces stiff competition from network attached storage.

NAS drives might not do everything the Mac Mini Server can, but they can do most of what most very small businesses need to do in house. The rest – such as hosting email or instant messaging – can be done just as well, if not better, in the cloud.

The Mac Pro server, too, is a curious beast. The Mac Pro has plenty of horsepower, but that horsepower is not really where you want it in a server. Most businesses run their servers “headless”, without a monitor, but the Mac Pro server has a pretty decent graphics card, for example. It does have two network ports, but has only one power supply, and, as the drives are inside a tower case with no external access, they cannot be hot swapped. Nor is there a lights-out management option for the Mac Pro.

More important still, for enterprises and for many smaller firms, is the physical form factor of the Mac Pro. Apple’s argument that businesses can fit two Mac Pro tower servers on a shelf in a 12U space is simply daft.

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