It is tempting to want to buy one with the attractive $999 price point.  Click here to read the specs.  I feel though that for most small business it would be a mistake to buy one.  Here are my thoughts below.

1.  Storage.  There is a built in dual 500GB hard drive installed.  While it sounds that you could just mirror the drivers, this is dangerous.  Mirroring the drive wouldn’t protect the single point of failure that this one unit represents.  In addition, it would limit it to being only useful in the smallest of workgroup situations.  Most designers easily work on multi gigabyte projects, and this would start to show its limits very quickly.

2.  External RAID array.  Apple suggests using Promise SmartStor DS4600 RAID which is 4 1 TB drives.  While this seems like a great option for small workgroups you should read the reviews first.  Click here.  For example you can only have one volume and some of the hardware is flimsy.

Then the next argument would be why not use another RAID array?  That would be fine, but the problem would be managing/mounting Minis.  Anyone who needs normal business storage will need a rack, and mounting a Mini isn’t like dealing with regular 1U units.

3.  Cooling.  The case isn’t metal and probably can’t take advantage of heating conduction.  I would suspect that they get stuck in a corner which would increase their failure rate due to overheating.  The  lack of IT departments being familiar with proper cooling, they might get stuck in closets where metal component servers do fine, but the fans may not keep up.

4.  Failover.  If the mini has a problem how easily can you clone or backup it?   It is a serial ATA drive which means when those hard drives fail you could be faced with a catastrophic situation.  Instead they should have included SSD that would fail gently and still allow people to retrieve their most important data.  Some companies have requirements for the kinds of hard drives used, and it is doubtful you can just put any hard drive in there without voiding the warranty.  Is it cost-effective for a small business to replace those hard drives with SSD at this point?  The data is the most crucial thing in any server configuration.

5.  Hardware.  It has only one Ethernet port.  So what happens if that gets damaged or fails?  All of your data will be held hostage.  Yes it has wireless, but that is not efficient or practical for most of their customers in a business environment.  The least it should have is two Ethernet ports for backup and redundancy.  This limits its ability in being counted seriously as a real server.

There are many more ways in which this isn’t a server that I would trust for most clients.  It might be better to focus on who this might be good for.

It would be good for work groups of less than 10 people who are currently using an older server and who are growing and can’t afford an Xserve.  It would also be good for educational and home users who don’t really need reliability or those who’s possible failure doesn’t cost them financially.  It could also be good for gamers who need a more reliable place to store and manage their digital life than a Time Capsule provides.  I think many people who have a Time Capsule will upgrade to this actually.

I hope that I am wrong and that this proves a reliable  and cost-effective way to introduce the very useful Mac OS X server and all its open source features to the world.  I am just concerned that with the limited options, it is not up to the task.