Big news from Cupertino yesterday as Apple announced new products, one aimed squarely at the small business market. The new Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is a great option for new companies trying to set up shop on a shoestring budget.
For only $999, Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server lets you manage an unlimited number of Macs and PCs without additional licensing fees. Use it to maintain in-house email, calendars, contacts, iPhones, host a Web site, and everything else your business needs to run smoothly. Its two 500GB hard drives give you massive amounts of storage and the integrated Server Assistant makes setup easy for users with all levels of experience.
Until now, Apple has targeted the enterprise market with Xserve, a useful -- if not someone unapproachable option for small businesses. "When you start looking at an Xserve, you want to start looking at mass storage and tape libraries as well. Pretty soon, the cost of a fully-loaded Xserve starts looking astronomical to a small business... With the new $999 price point for a mini with an unlimited Mac OS X Server 10.6 license, two built-in 500 GB drives, and 4 GB of RAM, almost anybody can afford to own a server that provides email, instant messaging, calendaring, a wiki, podcast production, and more to a small workgroup," writes TUAW's Steven Sande.
What's your take on Apple's new Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server? Is it robust enough to take on Microsoft Small Business Server or one of the increasingly popular Linux server distributions? Let me know in the comments.
Posted at 08:01PM Oct 21, 2009
by Joann Yates in Sun
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Quite a few people + web development shops I've worked for have used Mac Minis for their server operation, and we're talking 2 generations behind with the GMA950 model, and haven't seen any problems yet. Great new price point for the new mini and some serious configuration with the hard drives for a change. It's a common misconception that it's too small to ventilate correctly - but I totally disagree!
Posted by Stephen Mount on October 21, 2009 at 09:37 PM PDT #
As an increasingly disillusioned Mac fan, I would only recommend this to the smallest of small businesses, and only then if they are extreme technical neophytes unwilling or unable to look for a better solution.
Never mind Linux or Microsnot, there is almost nothing here to compete with running OpenSolaris + open source apps (e.g. Roller, OpenFire etc), as a small business server - provided said business has an IT guy willing to set it all up. Even a "white-box" generic PC is going to be a waaaay better bet in terms of CPU horsepower, expandability etc - and it's a known quantity to troubleshoot under the hood if and when things go wrong. The same simply cannot be said for a Mac Mini. The local post-warranty repair bills for Apple kit in New Zealand have to be seen to be believed - and I don't mean this in a positive light. $1000 bucks to replace a power supply in a PowerMac G5? Oh yeah!!
For half the price of this Mac Mini I got my hands on an OpenSolaris Intel Q8200 job with dual HDDs which I run quite happily in a ZFS mirror - needless to say the degree of data protection this provides is far in advance of crummy HFS+.
Apple as we know the company today make beautifully engineered and designed products - which yes, mostly "just work"...but their arrogance towards the customer and their increasing tendency to lock-in quite simply is a deal breaker. The only other point on which I would recommend Apple kit is if the end user wants to do multimedia production - for this it's a platform without peer, and the *only* reason I still keep my PowerMac G5 hanging around.
Otherwise - no way.
Posted by Dave on October 21, 2009 at 09:51 PM PDT #
P.S
If we are talking say five to ten seats, without needing to do multimedia, then I have only two words to say:
Sun Ray.
Posted by Dave on October 21, 2009 at 09:54 PM PDT #