1. That's certainly a possibility, and one that we won't really have hard numbers on for some time to come. However, the fan is about a $60 part, so provided that we don't have coordinated, catastrophic failures and that they live for at least a year, we're doing alright. Do note that Apple specifically says that the Mac Pro may be operated on its side. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201379
2. True, but 1U per server is not bad density by any stretch. For my app servers, they effectively occupy 0.5U; database and storage effectively occupy 1U. So this puts the Mac Pros on par with the larger server class. Were we to deploy renderers in conventional server chassis, a similar system would occupy at least an effective 1U if not a full 2U.
What Apple does internally is, of course, shrouded in mystery. I know some people there, and we talk to people when we can, but they just aren't the kind of company that is going to tell you how they make the sausage.
From what I've heard and my sense from speaking with them over the years, they do not use OS X in production. They used to use Darwin and Solaris, and now almost exclusively use Linux (presumably Solaris is still around to run Oracle). They did used to use Xserves internally, but even at their scale it isn't worth building them just for their own use.
Fascinating, I had no idea Apple approves using the Mac Pros on their side. It would be interesting to find out what happens with the fans.
It's also fascinating that they are running Linux internally nowadays, for their server side stuff. What next, I find out that all of the Microsoft data centers run Debian :) Considering that they employ all of those Objective-C and Swift engineers, you would thing that they would want to leverage their workforce write Obj-C or Swift backend code as well. For most backend tasks either Swift or Obj-C is as good of a language as any other.
Any way, rackable OS X systems are a missed opportunity for Apple. They can sell them to a company like yours, movie production houses, and even design some libraries and make a play for the web app market with Swift. Not sure how successful the last one would be. As for the economies of scale, they don't even need to manufacture or design the system, take an off the shelf rack mount server from another manufacturer, fiddle around with the casing a bit to give it that Apple feel, and load OSX on it. Perhaps the margins in the server side hardware are way too slim.
I feel quite lucky to have got a few before they stopped selling them. I have three dual-cpu xServes still running as our main app servers and they've been some of the most reliable boxes we have.
And I don't believe that they only started using unix operating systems not their own "nowadays" - when OS X was too immature during development and its long maturation what did you think they were using?
I thought they were using NeXTSTEP, hence all the NS API calls in Obj-C. Back in 1989 I am guessing NeXT would be built on some kind of Unix system first. Considering that OS X is a descendent of NeXT, I would think that before OS X, they would use it to run code, servers, etc.
2. True, but 1U per server is not bad density by any stretch. For my app servers, they effectively occupy 0.5U; database and storage effectively occupy 1U. So this puts the Mac Pros on par with the larger server class. Were we to deploy renderers in conventional server chassis, a similar system would occupy at least an effective 1U if not a full 2U.
What Apple does internally is, of course, shrouded in mystery. I know some people there, and we talk to people when we can, but they just aren't the kind of company that is going to tell you how they make the sausage.
From what I've heard and my sense from speaking with them over the years, they do not use OS X in production. They used to use Darwin and Solaris, and now almost exclusively use Linux (presumably Solaris is still around to run Oracle). They did used to use Xserves internally, but even at their scale it isn't worth building them just for their own use.