Psystar puffs out its chest, introduces off-license OS X servers

Apple hasn't sued Psystar yet, so it's no surprise the company is pushing the envelope as far as it can -- it's just introduced two rackmount servers that come with OS X Server pre-installed. The OpenServ 1100 and 2400 are both configurable with 2.5 GHz Xeon processors and up to 16GB of RAM, with the 1U 1100 sporting four drive bays and the 2U 2400 rocking six. Just like Psystar's other products, you're on your own (or at the mercy of Psystar) for service and support, since Apple won't help you -- and considering Psystar kept sending us support tickets for that DHCP issue but never actually called us to resolve it, that might make enterprise customers a bit wary. On the other hand, with prices starting at $1599, we're certain some desperate render shop will take the plunge.

[Via Information Week]

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 21st 2008 6:47PM]

Excellent post which goes to highlight Microsoft's absolute dominance and Apple's inadequacies.

[NohOne Posted Jun 21st 2008 3:37PM]

(Stupid comment system, reposting so it will be in the proper thread rather than seperate)

@ef15e

From http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15057/1023 Windows server has a 70% market share, 20% Linux, Unix > 10%, and Netware making up the rest.

According to http://news.cnet.com/Windows-bumps-Unix-as-top-server-OS/2100-1016_3-6041804.html (a 2006 study, but even if you say that Apple grew 73%, you can still make some assumptions):

"The Unix market, though, is still huge, and the three major players are fighting for every scrap. In another first, IBM secured the top spot in 2005, with 31.8 percent of the market to Hewlett-Packard's 29.8 percent and Sun's 26.2 percent."

I will assume that OSX is in that >10% Unix portion. But that 10% UNIX also includes Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX, very popular servers in the UNIX community.

Sun shipped 20000 x86 servers in one quarter of FY2006 (yes, a few years back, but market share does not change dramatically year over year, and is included in the percentages from above for UNIX) according to http://news.cnet.com/Sun-shipped-about-8%2C000-Galaxy-servers/2110-1010_3-6031248.html?tag=nw.2

This means that there are about 76300 UNIX servers sold/quarter, or 762000 total servers sold/quarter, giving OSX a 1.14% total market share, and Windows a total of 533400 sold/quarter. 533400>>8700.

The final results are not exact (SUN sells more than just x86 servers), but it would actually bring down the percentages for Apple, not make it better.

[NohOne Posted Jun 21st 2008 4:06PM]

Odd how my response was deleted, but the post that the comment system put in the wrong place was left intact.

And why was it deleted? Giving facts and figures to show that 8700 servers sold is a very small percentage of overall servers sold is bad, but some of the other crap posted around here is OK?

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 21st 2008 6:47PM]

Excellent post which goes to highlight Microsoft's absolute dominance and Apple's inadequacies.

[krazygoat Posted Jun 21st 2008 11:58PM]

I love how people come on here and spout about stuff they know nothing about.

I work for a large visual FX studio and we are all Mac, our render farm is all Xserves. We actually switched from Linux because of LOWER total cost of ownership and Apple business support has been great.

When I was at ILM before to work on Pirates 3, guess what I used a Mac running Shake.

More and more UNIX and Windows software for the VFX industry is moving to OS X, take Houdini for one, Rhino, and soon Solidworks. We run Shake, Maya, Modo, Nuke, Boujou, among other off the shelf top level tools and all run great on OS X. Almost all our freelancers who came from Windows shops were surprised how open, flexible, and stable our pipeline was and even some of the die hard users switched over to Macs for the homes. Rush is great render farm software and is rock solid on OS X and you have the added benefit with an OS X pipeline of running easy quicktime preview renders.

Before I was in Visual FX I was in IT as a Linux, UNIX, Mac consultant for a Children's Hospital and for a telecomm. Children's was almost exclusively Mac for the research division, what wasn't Mac was UNIX (Sun and SGI). Digital Radiology was all Mac and Sun. Windows boxes could not be trusted outside of business departments which accounted for 4 times more IT tickets per user than any of the Mac systems. In Telecomm Windows was NEVER used. Surprisingly for the voice switching systems it was all OS/2, for our VoIP platform we used Solaris, for platform management we used Linux, and finally for email, call center, web serving, desktops, and pretty much everything else we used Macs.

So until someone can show me otherwise Macs running OS X Server make great servers and Macs running OS X make great desktops. Most the naysayers have never worked with it or taken the time to learn anything outside of their dime a dozen MCSE world.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 22nd 2008 9:24AM]

these guys make so much money. I met one of the guys from psystar buying a mobo at the tigerdirect outlet store I work at. He says they get a ton of orders each day.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 22nd 2008 3:40PM]

One Stigma Mac's have is that their users are Snobs, Rich, Woman or Gay.
Most users have pc's with windows installed, they learn how to use it and are comfortable with the OS, regardless of it's issues.

I tell you, when you can easily install OSX on any machine legally you would see a lot of Windows user trying out the Osx and they may just love it.
There is a lot of windows users trying out linux because it can be install on almost anything for free.