Into x86 servers? Apple seeks 'upbeat and hard-working' hardware engineer Apple has tipped its hand by posting a job advert that reveals some details of the "next-generation" storage and server equipment it is building in its data centers. The corporation has posted a cheery recruitment ad seeking to hire an "upbeat and hard-working hardware validation engineer to develop, implement, and complete …
Apple's current data center hardware configuration remains a mystery; though it has used Unix-based IBM AIX and Sun Solaris servers in the past, it's assumed Linux is in wide use in its fleet.
Sun hasn’t been a thing since 2012 and aix is unix with bsd extensions available.
Given they still support OS X on x86 and mere mortals can hack it to run on cots x86 then I would have thought that they’d be at least running their own os on that x86 gear which would make it predominantly bsd unix not Linux.
iCloud runs on top of AWS, if they want their in-house data centres to keep compatibility with AWS then they would run Linux.
https://www.scmagazine.com/news/security-news/cloud-security/apple-encrypts-its-icloud-data-on-google-aws-clouds
its not quite as simple as iCloud running on AWS, or Goggle, the various articles state that apple use Google & AWS for storage & that Apple encrypt that data in the cloud providers storage.
nothing states that AWS or GCP is running software for Apple. This is IaaS.
I would not be surprised that Google Cloud & AWS are running some software for apple on linux x86 to facilitate this iCloud storage for Apple but it most definitely is not all of iCloud on AWS or GC as suggested.
re OSX server, yes Apple no longer sell X server for customers, but it was effectively a rack mount server running OS X with a suite of server type Apps. They still do the OS X server app but it has barely any features any more.
in BSD/UNIX/LINUX whats the difference between a workstation/ end user compute device & a server? the answer is typically that the server doesn't have the stuff that makes a workstation/euc a workstation/euc.
I love my M1, both in iPad and Mac Mini forms. However, in terms of reliability at scale and over the long term, it is untested
When dealing with production servers , you want to know your architecture is reliable, scalable and support is available if there are any problems.
Note: I know that ARM has been deployed at scale, but while M1 is based on ARM, there may be differences, and those differences may cause problems.
X86, in all it's variants, and for all it's faults, is well known, and as a race we have 40 years experience of deploying it at scale, so it makes sense for Apple to use it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying they shouldn't use M1 (or some variant of ARM), it's just they need to test it at scale first.
There's nothing to test. The M1 has no external memory bus or chip-to-chip QPI bus, so cannot work in a multiprocessor server and is unable to access more than 64 GB of RAM. By contrast, a dual-processor C621 motherboard can have 4 TB of RAM and 76 Xeon Scalable cores and can handle hundreds of EC2 instances.
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