Mac Mini Reliability

[franton]

We took delivery of 8 mac mini servers a month ago now. Each of them is the 2x 1Tb configuration. I build them into casper distribution points and turned the drive pairs into a RAID 1 configuration.

Really glad I did that. Two of the servers in production have within days of each other dropped a hard drive. In fact looks like one of the drives in each mac has died and disappeared. That ain't normal.

What is everyone else's experience of mac mini servers? Am I just extremely unlucky before I go complain like hell to Apple?

[gskibum]

I have 5 current model Mac minis. I have accumulated them over the last year or so. Some have the 1-TB spin drive, others I rigged with SSDs. It's the servers that I use the SSDs on. No failures yet. So maybe Apple got a bad batch of drives.

Over the years I have encountered far more 2.5" drive failures than 3.5" (disregarding the Seagate firmware fiasco from a few years ago) so I just don't trust 2.5" spin drives for server work.

I've been using the 1-TB Samsung 840 EVO-Series SSD.

[franton]

Ok i'm going to rip out all the mac servers I got and have them replaced. They're all the same batch and they're all starting to show signs of failure.

Apple, prepare for a "firm" phone call.

[daz_wallace]

Good Luck! : )

Darren

[calumhunter]

still using physical servers? Jump on the virtualisation bandwagon!
Ubuntu and netatalk/samba/apache for distribution points works great and you can leverage your infrastructures existing storage and backup features.

[franton]

That was my original plan, however there are many reasons why it's not currently practical to do so on our estate ... just yet ...

[acdesigntech]

not all of us are so lucky, @calumhunter :(

I've been pushing for ubuntu for years now and my place of employment is staunchly against anything not windows or Mac. So i'm stuck with Mac servers for the time being.

[jwojda]

why not use the Mac Pro's they make rackmount enclosures for them now?

[nessts]

6 servers in a 72" rack is an awful expensive real estate for machines that only have one power supply. mac servers are for home use only IMHO.

[jwojda]

i'd trust a mac pro over a mac mini server any day of the week.

[nessts]

do they have rack mount for the new cylindrical MP? you might be able to get more of those in, but then you would have all these non-locking thunderbolt cables ready to disconnect when somebody slides out a server on its rack to show it off. :)

[acdesigntech]

I thought the rack kit from sonnet added a redundant power supply? Maybe the picture just looked that way

[acdesigntech]

eh, looks like it has additional power supplies for expansion cards, not redundancy for the "server." After all, why would anyone want that?

[jwojda]

There's also this one..
http://mk1manufacturing.com/store/Mac-Pro-c19/

[chris_kemp]

You couldn't add a second power supply to an expansion chassis anyway. You might be able to make a dual-powered source for the equipment inside, so you could shift from one AC leg to another, but if the PSU goes on the computer then it goes.

That said, I don't see it as being hyper-critical. I've replaced only 2 PSUs on our Mac Pros over the past 6 years: one of them was a case of infant mortality, and the other, IIRC, had to do with some misplaced coffee. We've yet to lose a PSU on either our iMacs or our Minis. Dealing with power service is a bit of a pain, but then again the JSS isn't so critical that it can't be manually moved to the other leg prior to testing/service anyway.

[franton]

In my case I don't have either the budget or the rack space for Mac Pros. 6U's is a lot excessive to me!

[ctangora]

I would not take any Apple Server seriously after they canned the XServe.

The XServe was a decent enterprise class server, a little weak, but still reliable and had components made to be swapped out in case of failure. The recent models from Apple are not like that. If you have a failure you are disassembling the machine, not just swapping the parts out.

If it is possible I would suggest moving to a different server platform.

[scottb]

I agree with @ctangora - we still have live XSAN/XServers up from 2007, but when they die, they're gone and it will be Wintel. We have all of our JSS/DP stuff on Wintel, and since I don't have to mange them, I'm much happier. the fact that our 2007 setups are still live and working great tells you something, but no way I'd use any current Macs as servers in anything but a test or home setup. Got our asses kicked once, that's enough.

[gskibum]

In the Mac-based small business environment I loved the old Mac Pro towers. Never had one bit of hardware failure with any of them. Attaching SAS or Mini-SAS RAID was very reliable too.

Several times I was successful at deploying Mac servers within departments in enterprise. The users would have all sorts of compatibility & performance problems with the Windows servers and a Mac server would make them happy campers. Sometimes there would be a change in IT personnel who would then eliminate the Mac servers, only to have the users return to a slow, miserable experience. Sometimes these users would protest loud enough and they would get their Mac servers back. Sometimes there would be yet another change in IT personnel and they would get their Mac servers back.

Rinse and repeat.

My point being was that the end users *by far* preferred the Mac servers over the Windows servers.

However Thunderbolt is just too easy to inadvertently unplug. I've also had a hard time finding RAID controllers that actually work as expected in Thunderbolt systems. I fried a Sonnet Thunderbolt PCI enclosure & Thunderbolt cable by hot unplugging a Mini DisplayPort monitor from the Sonnet. There's much necessary maturing of Thunderbolt technology still to arrive - hopefully it arrives anyway,

And then there's Apple's very sloppy transition away from AFP to SMB. This has been embarrassing!

[scottb]

@gskibum: yes, users and we alike liked them better. But Apple hosed us. The next best thing, and what we had prior, was Wintel with Extreme-Z IP. Before that it was Netware. If Apple hadn't dumped the Server hardware, I would have loved to keep those in place. Apple has been embarrassing in many ways in the Enterprise, in spite of sputtering starts and stops over the years to "support" it. Best to just leave the heavy lifting to other platforms and do our best.