The End of Apple Server Biz!

Yesterday was the official end of the Apple Xserve server! The end of an era? Does anyone care to shed a tear? No? OK… I didn’t much notice, either!

Apple’s server biz relegated to ‘prosumer’ status with Xserve’s end

“As the company announced last November, no orders for the server hardware will be accepted beyond January 31.

While there is a community of server admins who use Mac server hardware, the discontinuation of Xserve has not been met with any wails of anguish from the IT community.

After Xserve is completely liquidated, Apple will only sell specially configured versions of its Mac Mini and Mac Pro as servers. This means the sole remaining part of Apple’s server business is OS X Snow Leopard Server, which is itself, not that different from client versions of Snow Leopard.

What’s left of the Mac server business is almost a ‘prosumer’ category, that is, where consumer hardware can be tinkered with to create something that could work in professional settings, as long as they’re not too demanding. Naturally, companies dealing with alternative Mac server products are popping up today to remind the world that there are options for the Mac Minis that Apple called it’s ‘most popular line of servers’ back in November.”