Using the Mac Mini as a Server, Part 1
Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007.
I have been fascinated with the Mac Mini for quite sometime and actually thought that this piece of hardware would be my entrance into the world of Macintosh due to its size, price, and the fact that you can use your already existing DKM. When I purchased my MacBook from the Apple Store in Plano, Texas, I talked with a salesperson about the Mac Mini. She said that a lot of people were purchasing the Mini for use as a server. I thought that was an extremely cool idea.
Think about it. Most data centers aren’t getting any bigger. Every server manufacturer out there is trying harder and harder to cram more and more into 1U rackmount servers. Even so, the length of these machines is way too long. I mean, you took a tower server and squashed it down to like an inch to an inch and a half tall but the rest had to be flattened out and spread over a larger footprint. The Mac Mini measures 2 inches tall and is 6.5 inches square. How many of those things can you fit on the real estate a 1U server takes up?! A lot!
Now, let’s be fair in this comparison. Size isn’t everything as there are some things you can get in a 1U rack server that you can not get with a Mac Mini and its petite footprint. Guess what?! No redundant power supplies, no multiple drives for mirroring or RAID configurations, no SCSI controllers or backplanes for drives or other SCSI devices, etc. You do lose some niceties of a “normal” server in the Mac Mini’s small form factor, but there are alternatives to the items you can’t contain inside the box physically. Now, power on the other hand… uh… get a UPS and pray the Mini’s power supply never goes bad!
Ok, so here’s the deal. I’ve decided to use a Mac Mini as a replacement server at work. I need the hardware that my FreeBSD DVR is running on for my affordable surveillance system. As my project progresses I will keep the blog updated with my experiences with using the Mac Mini as a server. And a high traffic FTP server at that. Let’s hope the system can keep up!
Until next time…