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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#111

Post by bane »

lsllc wrote: post #40
bane wrote: post #29

It's really kind of mind-boggling that Apple makes and sells the Pro, which can be upgraded to a really nice high performance GPU workstation, but then doesn't sell the same hardware in rack mountable forms for clusterable computing. I'm sure they've performed some kind of market analysis for this, but there's enough differences between OSX and Linux solutions that for people who use HPC solutions (a growing market)…

Apple used to sell the rack mounted X-Serve, but discontinued that a few years go.

Yeah that was years ago. IIR there were all kinds of administrative headaches with those, though I never dealt with it myself.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#112

Post by jallmann »

josu wrote: post #96
jallmann wrote: post #78

This seems risky from a business perspective: it's voluntary vendor lock-in. What if Apple decides to change the Mac Pro form factor for the next iteration? Then you have to retool and are left with a bunch of incompatible chassis. What if Apple stagnates with hardware upgrades? You'd be stuck running obsolete hardware. What if Apple discontinues the entire Mac Pro line? Not to mention the price premium of Apple hard…

You have to look at it as an entry barrier that protects them against competitors too. If they are the only ones offering this setup, they can charge very high prices and recover the initial investment relativelly quickly.

> look at it as an entry barrier that protects them against competitors too

What barrier to entry? Their customers don't care that OSX is running under the hood. You can offer an image processing service using any platform today. Sure, on Linux it probably wouldn't be as efficient, but it doesn't have to be. Scaling is a Good Problem to have.

Basically, as you grow, it helps to take a critical look at risk factors and the technical debt which contributes to that risk. The longer you wait to pare down that debt, the more expensive it is, and the more exposed you are to that risk. A little more work up-front saves a lot of work later on.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#113

Post by tinco »

rsync wrote: post #109

I have two conflicting responses to what I am seeing here ... First, this is awesome. Just like I want to live in a world where people are paying picodollars for cloud storage[1], I also want to live in a world where a bunch of mac pro cylinders are racked up in a datacenter. Very cool. Second, this is complete silliness. I'm not going to go down the rabbithole of flops per dollar, but there is no way that you can't…

Obviously, but running OSX on non-Apple hardware is a violation of its EULA.

I have contacted a lawyer for this (I wanted to run Hackintosh in the office), the language is very clear. The author of the software has the full power to license its use to you with any restrictions they find necessary no matter how ridiculous. If Apple only sells you the license if you promise not to run it on a thursday, you'll be in violation of their terms if you run it on a thursday.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#114

Post by terhechte »

rsync wrote: post #109

I have two conflicting responses to what I am seeing here ... First, this is awesome. Just like I want to live in a world where people are paying picodollars for cloud storage[1], I also want to live in a world where a bunch of mac pro cylinders are racked up in a datacenter. Very cool. Second, this is complete silliness. I'm not going to go down the rabbithole of flops per dollar, but there is no way that you can't…

Sure, you can build such a hackintosh, but you're behind on OSX updates, you can't update automatically (it may break some of the custom hacks required), you probably can't use auto update. Also, some of the drivers may have additional bugs due to the ever-so-slight hardware change. In the end, your system may freeze more often, or display weird behaviour. All that apart from the EULA issue that was already mentioned. Maybe imgix already tested such hackintosh systems and realized that they're just not stable enough for continous high workloads.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#115

Post by zurn »

skuhn wrote: post #71
kaolinite wrote: post #13

Three possible reasons I can think of for doing this over using PCs or Linux servers: 1. Using the same operating system as the developers of the software, plus access to Apple's fantastic imaging libraries. 2. The Mac Pro, whilst expensive, is good value for money. The dual graphics cards inside it are not cheap at all. As servers with GPUs are fairly niche, this might actually be a cheaper solution. 3. The form fac…

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article) 1. Yeah, the OS X graphics pipeline is at the heart of our desire to use Macs in production. It's also pretty sweet to be able to prototype features in Quartz Composer, and use this whole ecosystem of tools that straight up don't exist on Linux. 2. I mentioned this elsewhere already, but it is actually a pretty good value. The chassis itself is not a ter…

> The power draw related to cooling for this rack versus a rack of conventional servers is about 1-5/th to 1/10th as much.

Do you mean your Mac Pros dissipate 1/5 to 1/10th as much heat as other x86 server hardware, or is there there some other factor in play that makes your AC 5-10x more power efficient?

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#116

Post by nulltype »

tinco wrote: post #113
rsync wrote: post #109

I have two conflicting responses to what I am seeing here ... First, this is awesome. Just like I want to live in a world where people are paying picodollars for cloud storage[1], I also want to live in a world where a bunch of mac pro cylinders are racked up in a datacenter. Very cool. Second, this is complete silliness. I'm not going to go down the rabbithole of flops per dollar, but there is no way that you can't…

Obviously, but running OSX on non-Apple hardware is a violation of its EULA. I have contacted a lawyer for this (I wanted to run Hackintosh in the office), the language is very clear. The author of the software has the full power to license its use to you with any restrictions they find necessary no matter how ridiculous. If Apple only sells you the license if you promise not to run it on a thursday, you'll be in vio…

Even if that were not the case, I doubt the performance of the OS X image pipeline is tuned for non-Apple hardware if it supports it at all.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#117

Post by selectodude »

grecy wrote: post #110
bluedino wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> but discontinued that a few years go. 11 years ago.

Discontinued Jan 31, 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve#Intel_Xserve

They were last updated in 2009 though, so those Xserves they were selling in 2011 were pretty dated.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#118

Post by adamio »

protomyth wrote: post #25

At this point, Apple should just license OS X for VMWare installations on non-Apple hardware so we can skip all this foolishness.

They would probably run their own OSX Based EC2 competitor before doing this

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#119

Post by ezafer »

This reminds me of the scene from the matrix where all those humans are suspended in cords as their energy is being drained off by a dark power.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#120

Post by tinco »

nulltype wrote: post #116
tinco wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, but running OSX on non-Apple hardware is a violation of its EULA. I have contacted a lawyer for this (I wanted to run Hackintosh in the office), the language is very clear. The author of the software has the full power to license its use to you with any restrictions they find necessary no matter how ridiculous. If Apple only sells you the license if you promise not to run it on a thursday, you'll be in vio…

Even if that were not the case, I doubt the performance of the OS X image pipeline is tuned for non-Apple hardware if it supports it at all.

Non-Apple hardware does not differ in any meaningful way from Apple hardware. The performance of anything in OSX is perfectly tuned for any generic desktop computer. It also supports most hardware straight from the box.
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