Is Apple looking the other way in the data center?
Apple has at long last begun to make inroads into IT departments in San Francisco and elsewhere. Even many diehard PC users now have an iPhone with them at work. There are more and more MacBook Pros being carried into conference rooms for meetings. And in offices, Mac Pros and even iMacs are making an appearance. The numbers are not overwhelming by any means, but they are growing.
There is one place, however, where Apple is conspicuous by its absence—the data center. Walk into any data center today and you will find a plethora of servers made by IBM, HP, and Dell. You might even find some Sun servers as well. But you will not see many of Apple’s Xserve server products being pressed into duty in the data center. Now, why do you suppose that is?
It certainly isn’t that there are fundamental flaws with Apple’s Xserve platform. The Xserve runs Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard, a variant of the UNIX operating system that has become so popular in data centers. The Xserve hardware architecture competes with anything that is available from Dell, HP or IBM. It appears that neither hardware nor the OS is hampering the data center adoption of the Xserve.
Maybe it’s the price that is the showstopper to Apple’s entrance into the data center. After all, true or not, Apple does have a reputation for having products considered to be on the pricey side. To find out, Macworld magazine recently did a comparison of similarly equipped servers. While I admit an expectation that Macworld would have, ahem, a certain bias, their numbers appear rather straightforward.
An Apple Xserve configured with two 2.93 GHz Quad Core CPUs, 12GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, a RAID card, three 1 TB SATA drives, and dual power supplies carried a total price tag of $8,738. A similarly configured HP DL360 G6 had a total cost of $8,857. And a Dell PowerEdge R610, also configured to closely match the Xserve, cost out at $9,289. Assuming that Macworld was able to do a relatively close apples-to-apples (no pun intended) comparison, then it certainly isn’t price.
So what is the barrier to Apple’s entrance into the data center? There’s no way to know for sure, but here’s something to consider. It’s Apple’s product marketing—or, rather, the lack of it.
Great marketing, the very thing that has made the nearly ubiquitous iPhone so successful, and has begun to make business inroads for the Macintosh product line, is completely missing for Apple’s server line. Think of it. Have you ever seen a media blitz for Apple’s Xserve products? Even in the trade publications, it is rare to see the Xserve being advertized. And when was the last time your Apple Account Manager dropped into your office to talk servers? Think hard. If you are like most of the IT people I know, the answer may be long ago or maybe even never.
One has to wonder why this is. Is it that Apple's product marketing group is MIA when it comes to their server sales? Do they not care about that product line? Perhaps Steve Jobs is far less enamored with the data center and Apple’s server products. Maybe it’s a hold over from the early days of the company.
A director, IT person and lecturer that I know tells the story of when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak welcomed him into their offices. Apple was a relatively young company and the director wanted to include the recently released Macintosh in his new lab. Jobs dissuaded him saying that the Mac was primarily intended for the home market. However, he went on to suggest that this director call a new startup by the name of Dell who made products intended for business labs. And that’s precisely what this Director did.
Perhaps the philosophy of business aversion continues to this day. If so, it is at Apple’s detriment and to the detriment of its potential customers. Apple should do something to fix this. Either that, or get themselves out of the server business altogether. It’s a business decision, but one that Apple should make soon. It is clear that they aren’t winning anything by sitting on the data center fence. And fence sitting is so unApple.
Comments
Usually it's the lack of applications.
I believe the reason that XServe + OS X Server do not have a strong presence in the datacenter is lack of marketing. For running a datacenter infrastructure on well-integrated OSS/standards-based services provided by OS X Leopard (directory services, kerberos single sign-on authentication, RADIUS, Jabber chat, mail, wiki, mailing lists, web services, and more) the Apple Xserve platform cannot be beat for ease of installation and configuration.
For a platform on which to run a custom web services stack, it is excellent and performs very well for the price as you note in your article.
These are the two strongest selling points for the XServe + OS X Server platform that Apple should be driving home.
That said, there are plenty of XServe hosts in our shops.
Why would Apple want to enter the data center market. Apple's marketing appeal is that it is a more elegant product. I don't think elegance means much in the data center. What is important is price and computing power.
Beside, the server revenues of IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun have dropped 25 to 30 percent in the last year. Where is the opportunity for Apple.
Bob
The ironic thing is that Apple has had for some time now a pretty decent product in their Xserve line that is fully qualified for data center use. So, in a very real way, they have already entered the data center market.
The problem, as Klange indicates in his comment, is that there is an amazing lack of marketing for the Xserve product. Many data centers don't use Apple's Xserve line because when they think of servers for the data center, Apple is usually not the first vendor that comes to mind. Again that's because the Xserve product line is not really marketed.
Your comment, Bob, that data center revenues have dropped substantially sounds right. That being the case, I find myself wondering why Apple even maintains the Xserve product line. It seems to me that they need to make a business decision to either need to market their server line better or relinquish the business. Right now they are doing neither.
Jeff
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