what about mac mini for filemaker server?

[mmonsalveg]

right now we have a windows server machine running filemaker server for 15 users.  4 macs and 11 pcs.

the reason im looking for a different machine is because the server is in a small room and if we close the door it gets very hot in less than an hour and it starts to sounds very loud like a turbine, so we have to leave the door open all the time .  one solution is to add an air conditioner unit but here in my country energy is very expensive , and that units is not for 24 hours working. 

the other solution is to buy a mac mini server with solid state hard drive, and 8 gigas memory .  that mac mini doesnt get very hot and is very quiet and can be placed almost anywhere. 

what do you guys think about this solution? will the windows machines works fine with the mac server?  will be faster to access the database than the windows ? 

i really appreciate your comments, 

thank you 

Mauricio 

[Claus Lavendt]

The MacMini is a very good solution for Filemaker server and they can cope with even a large number of users.

I have used them many places with 2-60 users and also for web solution with 50-100 simultaneous users.

With Filemaker, it does not matter if clients or server is windows or mac, beside the OS differences. So your windows users will work just as fine.

Faster ? Well, that obviously depends on your current windows server, as you have not outlined model and configuration. However, the new MacMini's are truly a powerplant. So I don't think you will notice speed decreases. I would suspect increase instead. However, that depends on many factors and not only how big the server is.

 

I am a MAC guy, so choosing a MAC for server is obvious choice. However, I have also experienced over the years that maintenance is minimum so you save a lot of time, using a mac as a server.

[Wim Decorte]

Keep in mind that the Mac Mini has very slow hard disks and if you go with SSD, it is consumer grade not server-grade so it will reach its performance cliff faster.

So I would not recommend it for the 60 users quoted earlier.  Probably not even for >10 users but that depends on the complexity fo the solution, the backup frequency and so on.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Precisely.  And in addition to Wim's excellent comments especially regarding consumer grade drives, I'd also add that SSD drives enhance read performance, but not write performance.  There are a few other issues with various of them as well:

 

http://fmforums.com/forum/blog/13/entry-201-gas-liquid-or-solid-drive-on/  has some additional information.

 

Steven

[mikeym]

I'm also considering a Mac Mini for a server moving forward. I think it's a viable and cost effective option depending on the type of usage you're going to expect (and your solution complexity as mentioned earlier). Not so sure I'd buy one with Apple's SSD installed, but it's fairly trivial (with the right tools) to install your own. I would imagine you could even put an enterprise class drive in there.

 

Right now we use an early generation Mac Pro with 10,000 RPM drives in RAID 1 and it works great but it'll be hard to justify replacing that system another Mac Pro given what is now available on the consumer side. Yes, there are definitely disadvantages to using consumer based systems but there isn't such a huge gap in terms of performance and reliability anymore.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Why would you use RAID 1 with a database server?  A more appropriate configuration would be RAID 5 or RAID 10.  RAID 10 is the preferred configuration.  And be sure to use a hardware RAID controller.

 

Steven

[mikeym]

More appropriate for whom would be the question to ask. Generally speaking, yes, RAID 1+0 would be the preferred configuration for database servers, however, given the limited usage and data throughput that I need, would my users or I notice a difference in performance? Not really. Do we need the additional utilization provided by RAID 5? No. Do we really want to have a 4 drive array for RAID 10? Not if we don't need to.

 

That being said, a properly configured hardware RAID controller with a battery backed cache does make a difference, and no, not all RAID controllers are created equal.

 

Mike