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MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

macstadium.com

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Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#41

Post by Udo »

calinet6 wrote: post #35
eddieroger wrote: post #24

What a waste of a Mac. I'm all for the novelty of doing something neat with Apple hardware (System X, macminicolo), but this machine isn't suited for headless closet-sitting. It's meant to be on a desk in Pixar, NBC or another live video venue, rendering things in real time and lighting up 4K displays.

Someone probably discovered that it's cost-effective due to heat and power efficiency. It might make more sense than you think. Maybe.

It depends on the application, but the 2 vast graphics cards that make up a sizable part of the Pro's power draw will go to waste completely in a typical server application. The setup could be interesting for compute tasks or specialized render farms, but then again similar performance could be had with much cheaper components.

I don't think there are lots of applications where the use of a Mac is actually a financially sound decision in this scenario.

Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#42

Post by reeses »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #34

I will offer my translation services for their marketing copy: "Meticulously engineered and constructed to facilitate 270 Mac Pro servers per POD while occupying only 12 square feet of datacenter floor space. " means "we have a cage in a datacenter with hot and cold aisles, and we bought off the shelf commercial racking and figured out how many we can fit in that racking" "a pressurized environment allowing the Mac P…

"ensuring 100% uptime" without an asterisk pointing to a 300-page list of exceptions is obviously hiding it deep in the T&Cs when signing up.

The amusing part is that this sort of assurance has exactly the value you mentioned. You may be running your $20m business on this $50 service (Elvis help you), but if you're down for a month, the maximum you're going to get back is $50, and very likely only in the form of a service credit.

I'm not sure if you looked at the other pages, because OMFG WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE GODADDY STYLE IMAGERY, but you'll note they're using EMC "Clarion" SAN devices.

Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#43

Post by yuhong »

nwh wrote: post #5
mattbee wrote: post #4

A desktop system with a novel thermal design is being packed in tightly in a way that the manufacturer probably hasn't tested, and in a way that's going to be hard to diagnose or fix? He who dares I guess :) What do people use hosted Macs for anyway? I guess there must be some niches, but surely everything that's great about a Mac is optimised for local usage?

OSX can only be run on Mac hardware. If you want virtual Macs within the EULA, this is what you must do. This would be attractive for people wanting to to build testing on mac machines, for example.

x86 Chromebooks uses different firmware too, which is sad because those UEFI bugs that affect Linux would be easier to fix if they didn't.

Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#44

Post by rbanffy »

hhw wrote: post #40
rbanffy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do continuous integration on a Mac or iPhone/iPad/iPod application and still be compliant with Apple's license, that's pretty much the only way to go.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but that would be more a development environment than a traditional server. That it would be used for developing client side applications would reinforce such a distinction.

Yes and no. It's a development environment because most of the development tools have to be there. It's a server because the CI machine should be running at all times and, ideally, should not have a user sitting in front of it bothering it with tasks such as browsing HN.

Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#46

Post by nwh »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #38
nwh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an enterprise you would not be using modified kernels with the copy protection neutered in production.

Two quick technical points: 1) OS X itself does not utilize any copy protection. There are no serial numbers, call-home activations, etc. 2) You can run OS X without any modified kernels or kexts with the right mix of hardware.

There is actually. Look for the following kernel extension.

   Don't Steal MacOSX.kext
(Name might be wrong, but it's certainly there)

Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#47

Post by hhw »

rbanffy wrote: post #44
hhw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but that would be more a development environment than a traditional server. That it would be used for developing client side applications would reinforce such a distinction.

Yes and no. It's a development environment because most of the development tools have to be there. It's a server because the CI machine should be running at all times and, ideally, should not have a user sitting in front of it bothering it with tasks such as browsing HN.

Running at all times does not equate to being a server. Nor does being headless. The important point is for it to serve clients. In this case, it could at most tenuously be a server in the sense that it would be listening to have code uploaded to it. That would more be a secondary function for the convenience of getting code onto it though, as that portion would not require being on MacOSX. It's the desktop functions that require MacOSX.

In any event, that's still a far cry from being an enterprise server. Generally, it should serve the needs of the entire enterprise and not just a single department. There should also be full vendor support for the complete solution, and a high level of fault tolerance to really be enterprise.

Re: MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation

#48

Post by eddieroger »

Udo wrote: post #41
calinet6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone probably discovered that it's cost-effective due to heat and power efficiency. It might make more sense than you think. Maybe.

It depends on the application, but the 2 vast graphics cards that make up a sizable part of the Pro's power draw will go to waste completely in a typical server application. The setup could be interesting for compute tasks or specialized render farms, but then again similar performance could be had with much cheaper components. I don't think there are lots of applications where the use of a Mac is actually a financia…

I agree with this. There aren't enough applications yet that even touch what the Mac Pro can do, and when they do exist, limiting them by network bandwidth through colocation seems like a dumb move. Give me a farm of Mac Minis any day.
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