If this is for anything else than PR then good God...
Racking Mac Pros
291–300 of 331 posts
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
At it's core OS X is Unix. In what way would Linux be a better choice? I am not saying that Linux is a worse choice, but for a company that writes an OS as one of it's core businesses, it only makes sense to run that OS in as many places as possible. For one, by running OS X as a server OS they would necessarily spend more time on development and improvement of the OS core. This would pay off in the long run by furth…
Because it isn't really about the OS, it's about the software. OS X is fine as a server platform, but it doesn't have the same software and support ecosystem for data center usage. Apple dumped that market with the Xserve because it didn't work for them. Red Hat/Suse/Oracle etc. all sell tailored solutions for that usage that are Linux specific technology (mostly, some stuff gets ported to other Unix derivatives but…
What tools is OS X lacking? From my experience most of the development and server tools are available natively on OS X. It lacks support for containers, but that would be a worthy addition, and I would say worth spending money and time on. The rest is already there for the most part. Developing further their server infrastructure would allow Apple to make a play for the corporate market. Any way, it's a silly argument. I thought they ran most of their backend on OS X, it looks like was wrong.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure where you got ec2 out of my comment. I also think you need to redo your math on the price per gflop for a Mac pro, ypou seem to be at least half the price of my back of the envelope work. Unless you have some crazy good supplier.
Exposing more detail behind this math is unfortunately not something that I'm ready to do, but I'm pretty comfortable with it in broad strokes. EC2 really is that much more expensive, when you factor in things like network bandwidth. As I noted elsewhere, I mention EC2 because all of our (funded) competitors run there. We can split hairs over whether I could save 10% on Linux systems vs Mac systems, but the elephant…
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Re: Racking Mac Pros
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they wouldn't. Look at the current state of Mackintoshes. People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software. OS X moves pretty fast, possibly faster than Linux, and Apple builds it to support Mac hardware.... the teams who are porting hackintosh code have to support a lot more hardware variety and they have less resources than, say, linux. Running mackintoshes in…
> People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software. Not here. My Mac is at about 11 days of uptime and it's under constant use. At this moment, I can't say it's less reliable then my Linux machines. In this specific case, however, I'd consider ditching the enclosure and ducting cold air through the internal chassis/heatsink. A Macpro is, essentially a heatsink with b…
Is 11 days of uptime supposed to be impressive?
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#295Great read. Nice website. Great Photos.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#296This 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…
> What if Apple decides to change the Mac Pro form factor for the next iteration?
It seems as though they're prepared for this. This version 2 of their process is already moving away from an existing Apple form factor to a new one. It doesn't seem to be a leap in logic to consider that, should a new form-factor be released, they'll modify their rack cases again.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#297Given all of the effort spent to use Quartz's graphics operations, I was curious as to how they actually performed. I opened an account and tried out the upsampling, and was a bit disappointed. http://chen.imgix.net/rose.png?w=560 What other upsamplers look like: https://github.com/haasn/mpvhq-upscalers/blob/master/Rose.md Looking at the other operations available, I fail to see what is done better by Quartz than jus…
Upsampling is a pretty unusual operation, though. A more useful comparison would be something like the common website task of scaling an image down to a thumbnail and adding a bit of sharpening and auto contrast/levels, etc.
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Re: Racking Mac Pros
#298Three 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…
BSDPy, AutoNBI, and Imagr provides a bleeding edge OS X deployment solution that runs entirely on Linux. OS images can be generated with AutoDMG, and Munki will keep them configured and updated afterwards.
Pop into ##osx-server on freenode if you want to talk to the devs.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I don't believe that they only started using unix operating systems not their own "nowadays" - when OS X was too immature during development and its long maturation what did you think they were using?
I thought they were using NeXTSTEP, hence all the NS API calls in Obj-C. Back in 1989 I am guessing NeXT would be built on some kind of Unix system first. Considering that OS X is a descendent of NeXT, I would think that before OS X, they would use it to run code, servers, etc.
Once upon a time Apple did try to make their own UNIX, A/UX.
Re: Racking Mac Pros
#300Really interesting post; the Mac Mini rack looks insanely cool.
This has myself and a colleague wondering what Apple run in their data centres. Can anybody hazard a guess? Is it Apple hardware with OSX? Is it custom/third-party hardware running *nix? I seem to remember somebody mentioning Azure not too long ago.