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Tim Johnson – http://carpefactum.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/10/jobs-stimulus-package.html
Romelle Slaughter – http://civilityisnotdead.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/innovation-never-stops-steve-jobs-1955-2011/

However, my argument is that things like hardware RAID and dual power supplies are really less necessary and can actually be detrimental in today’s world of “green” datacenters. I know of enterprise systems that have eliminated RAID arrays by moving to SSDs, which drastically increases performance at the same time. Since the SSD has redundancy built in, and there isn’t a 75 Mph spinning component to fail, the MTBF is drastically lower. When you look at Facebook’s Open Compute platform, the power supplies are not redundant, nor are they at Google from what I understand. They just duplicate the entire machine into an active-active spare. Looking at the Open Compute platform again, there is no mention of hardware RAID support on the logic board, despite having six SATA ports. My guess is that the data is, once again, spread between machines, rather than drives. A query to a colleague who works at the Oregon Facebook datacenter responded that they are implementing software RAID, which I interpret as being a software implementation, and the power supply supports two inputs- normal AC and a DC input from a battery backup, not redundancy power sources.

I do understand that the memory in a Mac Mini is much more constrained than in any of the products on the market today, including the Facebook specification (480 GB) and the HP specification (48 GB). Assuming that what I wrote is true, it’ll be interesting to see how Apple deals with that. At one point, I said that I wouldn’t ever recommend a Mac with less that 4 GB of RAM. Then, the SSD-based Macbook Air came out, and the latency introduced with Virtual Memory pages was considerably improved.

In no way am I suggesting that you’ll get datacenter tips from the Genius Bar. What I am suggesting is that Apple will have the stock available to be able to have something to you as quickly as what you say you can have from Dell, since it is stocked at your nearest Apple Store. They’ll also leverage the fact that the equipment going into the data center is the same as going into small to medium business, and will be able to provide it at a price that cannot be ignored.

The articles I’ve read about Unisys hardening iOS devices for government use has me thinking that they, like many companies, have different divisions for different purposes, and from what you say, the menial tasks division is vastly popular.

Back to the possible improvements on the Mini, it would require increasing the size and power consumption. There’s very little use for a virtualization platform that maxes out at 4 or 8 gigs of RAM. The current state of the art is 32+ gigs in a single box with dozens of cores, all of which is hot swappable and doesn’t require a trip to the mall to ask the iPhone/iPod salesperson for datacenter tips.

I think there is less ‘esteem’ for Unisys among the people that encounter them on a regular basis. They are more accurately viewed as the least expensive nationwide collection of moderately trained techs that can take directions over the phone and accurately fill out a return shipping label. Yes, they work in data centers, but swapping hard drives and other menial tasks that the customer doesn’t want to do themselves.