311–320 of 331 posts
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
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As I recall, the basic idea was for something lighter-weight than spinning up and spinning down imagemagick. Then again, one wonders why not just use FreeImage or something?
Is running imagemagick really that intensive? Isn't running shaders intensive as it needs to be compiled on the fly and handed off to the GPU driver?
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…
What happens if a random upgrade causes major performance issues, or worse, just flat-out breaks their use case?
Looking at you, PS3 clusters.
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Why pay 5-10X as much to host on AWS? It's not for free. Hosts have a really nice markup, compared to hosting yourself. Hosts make a lot of sense for small companies who can benefit from the aggregated demand and capital costs being spread over many clients.... but not when you're at the level of building your own datacenter, or even using a full rack. It's funny how since 1980 people have been talking negatively abo…
>Why pay 5-10X as much to host on AWS? You have no idea what the comparison is, and I don't either. But again, the criticisim is around running a business off of a bunch of Apple "trash cans". >advocating vendor lockin to windows. Linux is no lockin, Windows lockin via software vs. Apple for hardware and software. >"vendor lockin" to that platform Java, Scala,or any other JVM language protects from that, and to a les…
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…
re your hackintosh idea: I have no idea what the current state of play is, but I looked at this in some detail when they came out - and there was no way you could build a directly comparable machine without spending very similar money. The GPUs would just kill you, far more than any other components.
It's unlikely that this company needs all the hardware features of the Mac Pro - probably just the beefy GPUs. That's combined with the power density problems (and higher monthly costs) of this solution, compared to modern rack or blade servers, making it far worse value.
Compare this also to John Siracusa's woes over buying a new Mac: He wants a graphics card powerful enough to game on, and remain useful for a number of years. He wants to be able to get a retina display. He's for now stuck with a 2007 Mac Pro as Apple don't sell a suitable machine.
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> 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…
I think the part you quoted was referring to hackintosh machines only. Still, there's no doubt in my mind that Apple are doing some "move fast and break things" OS development.
How do you remote provision OS X? I mean, how do you get to the boot menu to choose network boof? With the crashcart?
The crash cart is the method of last resort, and it's come into play a fair amount as we were figuring out how to do this. The better solution is to have a NetRestore server on the network, and configure the Macs to boot from a particular server with the bless and nvram commands. Then on the server, you control if the image gets served or not based on some external logic (in my case, an attribute in my machine databa…
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The crash cart is the method of last resort, and it's come into play a fair amount as we were figuring out how to do this. The better solution is to have a NetRestore server on the network, and configure the Macs to boot from a particular server with the bless and nvram commands. Then on the server, you control if the image gets served or not based on some external logic (in my case, an attribute in my machine databa…
Have you considered a thin-imaging solution like DeployStudio?
Really 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.
I think that things can be quite different between orgs though, with some adopting a more enterprise-y appliance setup (NetApp Filers, InfoBlox, etc.) and others building services more like an Internet company (Linux servers and open source based services).
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re your hackintosh idea: I have no idea what the current state of play is, but I looked at this in some detail when they came out - and there was no way you could build a directly comparable machine without spending very similar money. The GPUs would just kill you, far more than any other components.
Apple fans often justify the prices with this argument, but in reality, there is no reason to buy a machine directly comparable in all aspects, just the ones I care about. And that can be had for a fraction of the cost. It's unlikely that this company needs all the hardware features of the Mac Pro - probably just the beefy GPUs. That's combined with the power density problems (and higher monthly costs) of this soluti…
When I was comparing hardware, you really couldn't buy comparable cost/flop GPUs for any significant savings (and you'd spend more on some similar builds), which was my point. No idea if that's still true. The idea that you could get the same thing for half the money just wasn't true.
Your comment about John Siracusa's problem doesn't seem relevent to the OP, although it something to consider if you were buying a machine for home use.