Unlike the old rack mount options for the trashcan Mac Pro units (eg https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros), it doesn't seem like much thought has been given here to a front-to-back airflow.
I'm also surprised they're touting the density of this solution— seems like the obvious thing would be to put the Minis on their sides. A 4U chassis has 17.5cm vertical space in it, and a Mac Mini is 17cm wide. With the Mini being 2in in height, that suggests 8-9 Minis in a 4U rack, vs 2 Minis in a 2U rack for Scaleway's trays.
EDIT: Here's a commercially-available solution that's 6/4U: https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/Rack-Mount-for-6-M4-mac-min..., you'd think it could basically be this but with the management plane behind or in front. And as others have said, making the management plane be more shared, so it's not 1:1.
Yeah sorry for mixing units like that. I think of it as a 19" rack and know that refers to the width, but I had to look up the height of a 4U chassis and Google told it to me in cm, so then I went with that for that dimension.
Sounds like 2 per 1U to me. I think it's power efficiency that limits filling a rack with typical 1U servers in most plans. The power efficiency here is probably not really impressive enough given so many power units, etc.
Yeah I'm a bit confused on that. In the picture, each row is definitely taller than the power strip, plus 1U is 44.45mm in height, whereas the current-gen Mac Mini is 50mm high.
I'm pretty sure the drawers are 2U, but given that I don't know how they would get 96 nodes in a standard 42U rack.
Yep! I would have thought about doing a 3d printed "tray" that goes under the mini and routes front/cold and back/hot air to the exterior of the rack...
I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail.
I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.
Grim environment in the rodeo. The /home/directory, which the Rasberry-Pi doesn't align or distill as a symbolic markup language in .async or transport layer protocol and refers to /dev/ spinlock rolling release kernel version recursion or discursiveness.
Scaleway's site and support is horrible, as you've found. But their pricing and offerings are solid and their network is... OK. For the price, they're better than Hetzner... if you can get signed up!
Totally different experience here! For a project I wanted to try “euro cloud”. Something comparable to digital ocean. No need for hyperscaler functionality.
It has been great. Good terraform provider and reliable service. I like their console, although the design feel very vaporwave to me.
Of course stuff can be better, but it is rapidly improving. The way they implemented grafana + user management was shit. But that’s fixed. Grafana still feels bolted on however. And login is a bit weird with their dedibox or whatever button next to the cloud offering. But no where near as confusing as aws is!
Also bumped on a bug in their terraform provider, found a related bug report, contributed some info and it was fixed within two weeks.
Quite happy so far. Running serverless sql, serverless containers. Secrets management and some iam config. No big stuff but quite sure it is capable to run a decently sized saas.
Continuing to act like these ugly hacks are a normal way of doing business, is a continual signal to Apple that they don't need to build a rack-mount PC or server ever again.
If their developer community grew a pair and made themselves heard, then maybe the billion dollar company would do their effing job and provide a proper rackable development platform.
Which they had many years ago, before they morphed into a company that builds telephones and furniture that occasionally functions as a computer.
Instead we pretend like extension cords and gluing Raspberry Pi's together is totally ok for professional purposes.
I get it, you did what you had to do, but you're not the only example.
They have the knowledge and it's existed in the past (Xserve) but they will never do it again because they design and sell furniture now.
Tell me they couldn't design a Mac Mini with holes for rack ears, built in BMC or serial console.... even if it was a specialty product people would pay a premium
> Continuing to act like these ugly hacks are a normal way of doing business, is a continual signal to Apple that they don't need to build a rack-mount PC or server ever again.
They technically still have the Rack Mac Pro, but that's such a half-assed offering that it's easy to forget it exists. It's a huge 5U chassis but if you look at the internals it's comical how little of the space is actually used for anything, because they kept the same layout as the Intel version which was designed to host multiple high-power GPUs, but dropped dGPU support in the Apple Silicon transition.
not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.
They’re connected to a single USB-C cable. For many technical reasons you can’t have a simple kvm which switches inputs. You’ll need to continuously power all 9 minis some way.
All nine USB-C cables will need a continuous, active connection.
To do this, you will need a smart controller that switches which port it’s talking to.
Or you can stick a relatively cheap device on every mini and and connect it to the network.
Having a “controller” for every mini means you can swap single units in both hardware and software very easily. There’s a one-to-one relationship and you don’t have to deal with pairing.
Just spitballing here, but if your interface to these things is USB-C, you should be able to boot them off an image that has a standard SSH key and then you can get in and ID them from a serial number or MAC address. I don't see the identification part as being a huge part of what's gained with the 1:1 configuration.
Is video forwarding part of the product offering, or simply considered required for management functions?
Either way, I probably agree that a raspi per unit probably makes sense at a scale of a few dozen racks, but it would be interesting to do the math on when it would be price-efficient to have a 1:n management node scheme. I don't imagine there are many USB-C hubs that support being display sinks on the downstream ports (if that's even possible at all) but perhaps you could use an FPGA to synthesize a small ARM core with a bunch of native USB-C interfaces capable of doing it?
> not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch?
Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning.
To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in how exactly it does USB-C switching, and it needs to be remotely controlled. A Pi is cheaper plus the failure modes of a Pi are more understood than the failure mode of some weird ass KVM switch someone cobbled together in China.
Simpler design... let alone constraints of the USB and/or other interfaces in use. Not to mention 1:1 of management port access to system access, where other solutions may be problematic.
Scaleway has some of the best prices for cloud Mac Minis and has better deals than the scam that is AWS's overpriced cloud Mac Minis.
Going with AWS for cloud Mac Minis is the quickest way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what to do with it and to flush as much cash down the drain as quickly as possible.
Fans generally are used to move cold air from in front of a rack behind the rack. There appear to be no fans at all here except those in the mini,which would cause the problem you discuss. I’m talking about supplemental cooling with a high volume low noise fan in a 2 or 3u enclosure.
It might be that they're limited by something else in their existing racks; say power or networking ports, so this is an easy hack to get into their existing rack scheme.
Readit News
I'm also surprised they're touting the density of this solution— seems like the obvious thing would be to put the Minis on their sides. A 4U chassis has 17.5cm vertical space in it, and a Mac Mini is 17cm wide. With the Mini being 2in in height, that suggests 8-9 Minis in a 4U rack, vs 2 Minis in a 2U rack for Scaleway's trays.
EDIT: Here's a commercially-available solution that's 6/4U: https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/Rack-Mount-for-6-M4-mac-min..., you'd think it could basically be this but with the management plane behind or in front. And as others have said, making the management plane be more shared, so it's not 1:1.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687e650a56916806eaaf8f62/...
You can find a bunch more detail in their related patent filings:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240397658A1/en?q=(%22m...
Sounds like 2 per 1U to me. I think it's power efficiency that limits filling a rack with typical 1U servers in most plans. The power efficiency here is probably not really impressive enough given so many power units, etc.
I'm pretty sure the drawers are 2U, but given that I don't know how they would get 96 nodes in a standard 42U rack.
I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.
It has been great. Good terraform provider and reliable service. I like their console, although the design feel very vaporwave to me.
Of course stuff can be better, but it is rapidly improving. The way they implemented grafana + user management was shit. But that’s fixed. Grafana still feels bolted on however. And login is a bit weird with their dedibox or whatever button next to the cloud offering. But no where near as confusing as aws is!
Also bumped on a bug in their terraform provider, found a related bug report, contributed some info and it was fixed within two weeks.
Quite happy so far. Running serverless sql, serverless containers. Secrets management and some iam config. No big stuff but quite sure it is capable to run a decently sized saas.
I'll try to sign up again in a week or two.
With 60 minis per rack, and custom sled cases.
If their developer community grew a pair and made themselves heard, then maybe the billion dollar company would do their effing job and provide a proper rackable development platform.
Which they had many years ago, before they morphed into a company that builds telephones and furniture that occasionally functions as a computer.
Instead we pretend like extension cords and gluing Raspberry Pi's together is totally ok for professional purposes.
And actually the project was made to be faster on the market than AWS on their M1 offer, not to be industrialized at first.
They have the knowledge and it's existed in the past (Xserve) but they will never do it again because they design and sell furniture now.
Tell me they couldn't design a Mac Mini with holes for rack ears, built in BMC or serial console.... even if it was a specialty product people would pay a premium
They technically still have the Rack Mac Pro, but that's such a half-assed offering that it's easy to forget it exists. It's a huge 5U chassis but if you look at the internals it's comical how little of the space is actually used for anything, because they kept the same layout as the Intel version which was designed to host multiple high-power GPUs, but dropped dGPU support in the Apple Silicon transition.
At 38 lbs and low starting price of $7,500 who can resist?
To do this, you will need a smart controller that switches which port it’s talking to.
Or you can stick a relatively cheap device on every mini and and connect it to the network.
Having a “controller” for every mini means you can swap single units in both hardware and software very easily. There’s a one-to-one relationship and you don’t have to deal with pairing.
Is video forwarding part of the product offering, or simply considered required for management functions?
Either way, I probably agree that a raspi per unit probably makes sense at a scale of a few dozen racks, but it would be interesting to do the math on when it would be price-efficient to have a 1:n management node scheme. I don't imagine there are many USB-C hubs that support being display sinks on the downstream ports (if that's even possible at all) but perhaps you could use an FPGA to synthesize a small ARM core with a bunch of native USB-C interfaces capable of doing it?
Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning.
To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in how exactly it does USB-C switching, and it needs to be remotely controlled. A Pi is cheaper plus the failure modes of a Pi are more understood than the failure mode of some weird ass KVM switch someone cobbled together in China.
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Going with AWS for cloud Mac Minis is the quickest way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what to do with it and to flush as much cash down the drain as quickly as possible.
This is not the image I expected to encounter under the title, “high density”.
Make those sleds taller and do three, maybe four per sled with a pair of large diameter fans. That’ll would be high density. This is medium at best.
My point is the picture doesn’t show any details on the room or what’s outside the rack so it’s hard to know what’s optimal.
Also keep in mind that these SLEDs are compatible both with the M2 & the M4. M2 require more surface area & cover the whole free space on the SLED
e.g. https://servermall.com/fr/sets/serveurs-blade-dell/?srsltid=...
Or find cable with matching length?
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