Apple to stop offering Xserve after January 31

By on Nov 5, 2010 at 7:16 AM
Hardware November 5, 2010

Let’s be honest, the enterprise server market isn’t typically considered an area of strength for iDevice-maker Apple — and this next announcement seems to reaffirm that to the world. The company has posted a note on its Xserve splash page that states: “Xserve will no longer be available after January 31.” The company does go on to say that it will continue to support the pricey server. Apple has also made a PDF “transition guide” for Xserve-enthusiasts (if they exist) available, which explains what the Mac OS X Server options are going forward. All the literature is worded with the exact same verbiage: “Apple is transitioning away from Xserve.”

The statement does make us wonder what the company’s plans are for its Mac OS X Server software product. Think Apple will license its server software to run on other, generic, OEM server hardware, or do you think Apple is just throwing in the proverbial tower altogether? The current recommendation in the company’s transition guide touts the Mac Pro and Mac Mini, pre-loaded with Mac OS X Server, as an alternative. Although, if you’re a company in need of serious servers, you definitely aren’t considering either of those machines.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this post with any additional information they provide.

Read [Xserve Page] Read [PDF Transition Guide]

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11 Comments

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  • John

    Hah.

  • http://twitter.com/charleshood Charles Hood

    I wonder what type of servers Apple runs in their new North Carolina data center?

    • Anonymous

      Magical ones, they run on Pixi Dust and hand gestures

    • http://twitter.com/alent1234 Alen Teplitsky

      IBM

    • http://twitter.com/Obj_me Michael Hurlburt

      Sun Sparc machines running Solaris and/or IBM RISC Power servers… Just my guess, Apple already uses solaris internally for email.

  • Anonymous

    Not a surprise at all… After all, where’s the multi-touch screen on the X-serve?

  • Off Rhoden

    Here is my prediction: Apple ditches XServe to make room for Apple Cloud Services.

  • Anonymous

    It’s got the iElectronics-r-us. What else does it need?

  • William M Rodriguez

    I can’t believe that with all the profitability Apple boasts, they would be willing to cut off such an important part of their businesses customers ecosystem. Where do I as a network admin go for fault tolerant Mac hardware now? This is a major blow to the Apple pro customer. As it was, it was already difficult to swallow that they had such limited options in server hardware and now that they’ve taken away the only option they did have, I can only hope against all odds that they license the server OS to other server hardware manufacturers or at least throw it in Larry’s hands so he can put out on Sun boxes with it as a BTO option. That last outcome would actually be an improvment to Apple continuing to produce xserves in my opinion.

  • http://twitter.com/Obj_me Michael Hurlburt

    I really hope they license OS X Server to an OEM. Maybe Apple still/will have a port of 10.7/Lion or SL to IBM(kind of likely as they used to run the Power(PPC-RISC) platform, and as a guess just like apple was running the “Marklar” program for X86/X64 they might be keeping a Power/PPC version of OS X running! Why the Hell not they probably have the right compilers!) I personally hope that Apple licenses OS X Server to(everyone listed next or at least /1/ of the following companies!) IBM(Power), Sun(SPARC), or IBM(POWER, X86, X64)/HP(X86, X64)!

  • http://allanwhite.net/ allanwhite

    They’ve just killed off a major part of the Final Cut Pro ecosystem. Pros need servers, PCI cards, and workflow systems that will be hard to replace without 1U Xserves.

    I’m investigating Ethernet-based SANs and workflow solutions.

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