Mac Mini Servers

Robert X. Cringely’s latest column is out and he offers some interesting speculation about Apple products this week. Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster Software wrote him:

“I bought two Mac minis this week — both will be servers. One is going to run my company’s store. Our new product is a runaway success — we’ve sold $350,000 worth of software in the first two months. I say this not to brag, but to make a point. The store is running on an old G4 cube. The cube isn’t under any kind of load at all. It processes one sale every five minutes or so. There’s absolutely no need for more store sites to run on a G5. If you’re processing a transaction every second, sure, get a G5. But if you are, chances are good you’re a multi-multi-million dollar business, and you don’t care what an Xserve costs.”

“The second box is going to be our source-code server. It’s safe as heck, because OS X includes one-click firewalls. And, again, it’s not like I have so many engineers that we’re checking in code every second. If it processes a transaction every ten minutes, I’ll consider our company very productive. For us little guys, the Mac mini is the absolute perfect server. I’m hooking up two identical external drives to each Mac mini (total of four), each two set up as a RAID 1. (Each drive is slightly bigger than the mini.) The chances of losing data via disk failure are astronomically low this way. And if a motherboard crashes, I can swap in the other box — I have a $500 hot-backup OF THE WHOLE MACHINE. I have a complete server ‘closet’ that fits in less than a cubic foot. It’s quiet. It’s got a redundant RAID built-in. It’s easy to administer and set up. I share a monitor and keyboard with my main workstation, so I don’t have any extra clutter. Look out, Linux.”