On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 11:04:46AM +0100, Ed W wrote:
> There is a guy who does Mac Mini hosting which seemed like an almost
You probably mean http://www.macminicolo.net/
> interesting idea. They list at a price more expensive than a bunch of
> supermicro Atom machines, but given that they use the 25W core2 part and
> have been really built for low power it seems like you might gain quite
> an advantage in power/cooling costs? They also seem to have a high
Not really. The Mac minis have no IPMI, do not integrate well into
racks so you'd need shelves, which means you'd have to build your
own data center. I also doubt they beat Atom in OPS/J. Back-to-back short
rackmounts ventilate well by convection (smoke funnel effect).
In terms of performance/price they're not really that good (and have
gotten worse with the latest Mac mini). They do not have 24/7/365
specced hardware (notebook hard drives). Etc.
> density and of course if you are CPU bound rather than RAM bound then
> the Core2 is likely vastly faster than an Atom?
If you're CPU bound, you just buy more cheap boxes, and charge
power users more.
> I can only assume that these boxes survive reasonably well in a hosting
> environment because someone else is already doing it...
I would like to see their failure rate. I presume the main reason to
run Mac mini is to cater to OS X users on the cheap. The OS X server
Mac mini is even less attractive in terms of price/performance.
> Anyway, so many ways to skin a cat...
There are many feline species. My target are people who
value a thin FLOSS wrapper about raw physical resources
(address space, bandwidth, computation, storage). Proprietary
components would be only in the way here.
> Ed W
-- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BEReceived on Fri Jun 18 15:38:23 2010