http://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/05/apple-discontinues-xserve-only-available-until-january-31st/Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Xserve will be available for order through January 31, 2011. Apple will honor and support all Xserve system warranties and extended support programs. Apple intends to offer the current ship- ping 160GB, 1TB, and 2TB Apple Drive Modules for Xserve through the end of 2011 or while supplies last. Apple will continue to support Xserve customers with service parts for warranty and out-of-warranty service.
For extremely simple tasks in a small office, sure. However it's not even close to a replacement for people that needed a full-fledged server in rackmount environments.
Not ones that run Mac OS X. Mac OS X Server may not get a lot of respect, but it's actually very nice.Most companies that need enterprise class rackmounted servers are not going to go buy Xserves anyway, as there are certainly better solutions on the market.
Is there anything that an XServe did that could not be done by a conventional Windows or *nix rack mounted server?
DoveCot Mail (10.6), LDAP (User Management), iChat server (jabberd), VPN, Podcast, Wiki, HTTP... etc.
You can also set up Netboot, so that you can network boot a Mac and restore an image to your machine over the network. (We use this a TON!).. Try 50+ MacBooks at a time (separate network on separate switches).
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/
You get a lot of functionality OOTB with a single 1U box. Now that they've taken the XServe away, I don't know what to think about Apple's Enterprise solutions.. Mini isn't powerful enough and the Mac Pro can't be rack mounted. Unless they're going to return into Enterprise with some cloud hosted system (NC Datacenter) but for our configuration it wouldn't make sense to do this.. (6,000+ Users).
I guess you could one-off some Mini for each application and have one Mini act as the Authentication server... wasteful though..
xserve/raid was like a cisco server - shenzen junk.
Stick to industry standard. xserve on bladesystem/HP DL just makes more sense. especially if it runs under ESXi.
If I recall correctly, Apple got the power consumption for the latest Mac Minis down to 8-10W idle (and the power brick is built-in too). Ideal for a server? I feel it's going to become the "digital hub" for the Apple ecosystem. Apple has been selling the option with OSX Server for quite a while now.
Mac Mini = OSX "hub" for photos, videos, music, contacts, iCalender, itunes content (the whole family can enjoy a single purchase), sync with Apple Cloud/ Mobile Me -- the Mac Mini will do all the heavy lifting.. will efficiently use mediocre broadband speeds throughout the day (when not at home) to download 1080p content in the future
Apple Airport Extreme + Time Capsule = Backup for everyone, Air print, sync/connect with Mobile Me
Apple TV = Stream content directly from Apple or previously downloaded content
iMac, Macbook, etc. = everybody will enjoy access to their own workgroup/login, saved work files, etc. from any Mac. If you're not at home, Mobile Me will keep you sync'd between the cloud and your server at home.
With this new Java deal with Oracle, I wonder if we could be seeing OS X on some Sun server/blade products.
I doubt Oracle has any vested interest in developing Solaris long term and it is not out of the question that Apple has continued to co-developing OS X for PPC similar to what they did with x86 when they were still pushing the G5.