On Feb 25, 2011, at 12:58 PM, Neil Laubenthal wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2011, at 11:26 AM, William H. Magill wrote:
>
>> As I recall, Virginia Tech's super computer (circa 2003) was 1000 G5s. (not
>> much info about it on-line anymore)
>
> True . . .but didn't that predate the XServe?
The G5s were all Xservs running OSX 10.3.9
... finally found the description...
http://www.arc.vt.edu/arc/SystemX/
>> The biggest problem for Apple trying to run on Apple hardware is -- The lack
>> of a blade.
>>
>> While the Mac Mini is tiny, it is still much larger than any blade
>> configuration.
>> There is a LOT of redundant "stuff" in a stack of minis equivalent to a
>> chassis full of blades -- speakers, disk drives, wifi, etc.
>> Not to mention that the Mini doesn't support FibreChannel.
>>
>> Which begs the question ... does any CONTEMPORARY Mac support Fibre Channel
>> .... or have the slots to take FC cards?
>
> I'm not sure that the overall rack space for minis would be significantly
> more compact than a blade chassis. Granted; there are lots of different blade
> chassis . . .but if you figure a 6U or 8U rack unit that contains 16 blades
> (or even 32 for half height blades) . . .compared to the number of mini's
> that would fit in the same space I think you could fit more mini's since
> they're small front to back and could be stacked both side to side and front
> to rear. There is some power supply duplication as well . . .and I haven't
> compared the Xeon's in a blade to the Core 2 Duo in a mini . . .but it isn't
> intuitively clear that the blade chassis would provide significantly more
> processing power.
>
> The lack of fiber channel in the mini would probably be an issue. I would
> think you could get a FC card for a Mac Pro . . .but they're really not very
> efficiently rackable.
>
> I wouldn't expect Apple to use minis . . although XGrid might be a
> possibility the lack of FC in the mini and the rack inefficiency of Pros
> makes them unlikely. Strictly from a server standpoint . . .commodity server
> hardware running Red Hat or a modified Darwin kernel seems like the best
> solution . . .although given that they might want to eat their own dog food
> the virtualized Lion installations running on VMWare might be a good idea as
> well. They could even XGrid a bunch of relatively small VMs to spread the
> performance across multiple physical hosts and let all of the FC/SAN stuff be
> handled by the commodity hardware.
I wasn't advocating for the Mini... rather making the same basic comments you
were...
however, as an operations type, the idea of stacking the mini's front to back
is scary... access for service, cabling and all that.
But I suppose one could use "telco style" racks, which are traditionally only
about 9 inches deep.
Both the Mac Mini Server and Mac Pro Server are "called" successors to the
Xserve.
As best I can tell, the current Mac Mini Server is simply a SOHO device ... no
reasonable attachments available, no FC, etc.
And, I definitely agree, a blade configuration of almost anything (consider
IBM's Watson) would be a better bet.
Similarly, the Mac Pro Server is still a "desk-side," SOHO device, and as best
I can tell no rack mount version is available, but it does have the FC card as
a standard build option.
However, since the new Mac Book Pro has "Thnderbolt" I think the rest of the
product line will also be rev'd to match soon. One might guess that Apple will
use the new Data Center as a mechanism for showing "How Apple Hardware can be
used in the cloud." Whatever that statement might mean... but it's clearly
something a marketing type would make. :)
Of course, the great unknown... is there REALLY anything which prevents Apple
from taking an "off the shelf" 3rd party blade configuration... (does Jobs talk
to or play bridge with Ellison?) and then either plug in their own boot Proms
or "skip" that part of the boot process.... (how DOES bootcamp boot?)
Considering that Apple uses EFI, could one simply begin the "pc boot" process
and point it to Apple's EFI... which is apparently what happens on Apple's
intel hardware. rEFIt (refit.sourceforbe.net) seems to imply that its easy to
do, although they are starting with intel macs that already have Apple's boot
proms.
It is hard to conceive of how Apple could be building a massive data center
based on today's Apple Hardware. Neither the Pro nor Mini, Apple's current
"server" offerings lend themselves to any kind of "dense" data center usage. Of
course, the new Mac Book Pro could probably be "stacked on a shelf," but that
would not be a particularly positive selling point for Apple.
The idea that Apple would run a data center based on somebody else's software
(i.e. not OSX) would also not be a particularly positive selling point for
Apple.
But then again, if one looks back on Jobs explanation about the termination of
the Xserve, "nobody is buying them," the idea begins to form -- Apple is no
longer interested in being a "computer" company, but rather a "consumer (read
mass market) products" company - i.e. iPhone and iPad. And besides, nobody
cares what makes up the cloud that supports me and iTunes.
...Interesting... I wonder what kind of "techs" Apple is hiring in NC. ...
Eureka! ...
"Enterprise Linux Systems Engineering and Administration in a virtualized
environment - Our data center environment consists of Mac OS X, IBM/AIX,
Sun/Solaris, and Linux systems. Though this position is focused primarily on
Red Hat Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux, you should also understand SAN,
RAID, file system, and IP networking technology.
A successful candidate will have 5+ years experience of enterprise-level UNIX
system administration/engineering, with significant and recent experience on
Linux platforms."
http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.showJob&RID=68396&CurrentPage=1
Job ID # 6200204 Maiden, NC
Sounds like Jobs does talk to Ellison... :)
Speculating about Apple is always so much fun. :)
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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