“But the power management and thermals are significantly different, and they updated from 1GbE to 10GbE network interfaces. “People would look at that and say, 'Well, it wasn't a big design change, you shouldn't have to do a whole lot of work,'” Beebe said. When Apple updated the system in 2018, it kept the same shape and size. "We add the enterprise upgrades that allow it to go from a consumer device that has a 1GbE port and a single power supply to something that looks like an enterprise server when presented to a hypervisor layer like VMware that has dual Ethernet, dual SAN fabric connection, and dual power.“ "How do you get a round peg in a square hole? We have a custom designed and manufactured sled,” Lankton said. Unfortunately, the cylindrical design - referred to disparagingly by some as a 'trash can' - does not immediately lend itself to being stacked in a rack. That’s to allow us to deploy in more points of presence, and to deploy more rapidly.” Pro designsĬurrently, the company's most popular device, the one it still deploys in the largest volume today, is the 2013 Mac Pro. "We still have lots of customers deployed in those racks, but for the 2018 Mac minis and for all the Mac Pros and for anything that comes after, we have designed racks that fit in standard 19” designs. Originally, “we had tons of Mac minis deployed in fully custom racks that are 10 feet tall and double wide and very non-standard,” Lankton said. To deploy the various flavors of Mac systems, MacStadium designs its own racks. Forced to rely primarily on consumer equipment designed to live under a desk, this can prove challenging. “In the last two years, our revenue has exponentially grown in the enterprise market - 70 to 80 percent of our revenue is from that customer base now.”Ĭore to wooing that enterprise audience is being able to offer the reliability, compliance and security standards of conventional data center equipment. “And as our product evolved, we got into virtualization and led the initiative to get Mac OS and Apple infrastructure supported within VMware. And so if it takes an extra few milliseconds to travel to the data center, that doesn't really impact the performance or the user experience."Īs a business, the company started “with a bare metal offering of Mac minis and Mac Pros,” Kevin Beebe, MacStadium’s VP of product management & security, told DCD. “If you're sending a build or a test job to one of our data centers, that may be a three minute or a three hour job. "But we don't really need to be within 50 miles of a customer for them to have a good experience, because the use case is not super latency dependent. "We have plans of getting to Asia in the near future and launching additional points of presence," Lankton said. Primarily, MacStadium uses private suites in Equinix and Zayo data centers, but has a small footprint in a Keppel facility in Dublin. Targeting companies that need to use the Mac OS, such as Xcode app developers, MacStadium operates server racks full of tens of thousands of Mac computers across five data center locations - Atlanta, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, Frankfurt and Dublin.
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