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Need a test server that’s actual hardware, not just a virtual machine? A grand and you’re good. Multiple machines is a good kind of redundancy, and I guarantee that your facility costs for five minis will be less than one Xserve.Įven if you are in a big company, the mini is a good fit. With a good backup plan, you can swap out a dead one within an hour or two.

True, the mini doesn’t have redundant anything other than hard drives, but, if you have five, just keep one as a spare. If you compare this new mini to the Xserve, it’s more like four or five minis for the price of an Xserve, especially if you have to buy the rack to put the Xserve in. One bites the dust? Restore from backup to one of the other machines and you’re back up and running while you get the mini repaired or replaced.

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Thanks to the way Mac OS X Server works, you could actually have all your minis set up as replicas of each other, but with different services turned off. The minis will take up less room, run quieter, and allow you to split your services up.

Mac mini server mail pro#

Need to take backups more seriously? Go buy a FireWire RAID stack from Promise Technology, Drobo, or whomever, stick it on the mini, turn on Time Machine services on that server, and you now have about 8TB of storage for your backups.ĭo you have an Xserve or a Mac Pro that’s getting overloaded? Deciding that you need to split off some of the services? While the mini wouldn’t be good for heavy lifting-databases, Java application services, and so on-for things like Web, wikis, blogs, e-mail/groupware, or even running Mac OS X 10.6 Server’s new Mobile Access Server, the mini’s a great choice, and you can get three mini servers for the cost of a single low-end Mac Pro with Mac OS X Server. Again, including enough consultant to get it up and running, you can have a small groupware server for that same $1500 or so.

Mac mini server mail free#

And it takes up less room than a stack of CDs.ĭeciding that you need more calendaring or e-mail than you’re going to get from a free hosted service? Again, for a smallish business-say, up to 50 users with light e-mail needs-the mini server is a great option. Total cost? Less than $1500, and that’s including the consultant. You set it up with the 500GB drives as a RAID 1 or mirror for some redundancy, and, with maybe an hour or so of a consultant’s time, you’ve got a little file server. They want a file server that’s small, quiet, unobtrusive, easy to manage, and doesn’t cost more than three month’s rent. Take a business that has outgrown the “home” part of SOHO-five to ten users, mostly iWork/Microsoft Office documents, some PDFs. (Well, no one sane is.) Used correctly, however, the new Mac mini configuration is a heck of a box. Heck, you have to use an external drive just to use optical media.Īnd to that, I would say, “What’s your point?” Look, no one is telling users to throw out their rackmount servers in favor of this particular mini. No, it doesn’t have dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Instead, the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server really is-besides a really awkward name-a fantastic little server for a little more than $1,000 (once you add in tax and a few options) that can be surprisingly useful to those who set their expectations realistically.

It’s not going to manage thousands of users, or massive data needs, or be the only email server for GE. This $999 Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server ( Get Best Current Price) is not an enterprise-grade server, or even a big business server. First, let’s clear something up about the Mac mini introduced by Apple in October that’s configured to be a server.