[adhesive_wombat]

Seems completely nuts that you have the "shuck" entire assembled computers for this. Reminds me of the story about the Soviet factory ordering tractors just to remove some component like a single bearing for manufacturing something else.

[SloopJon]

I somehow expected more density for a custom arrangement like this. One eviscerated mini per sled, ten sleds per rackmount chassis, six chassis per rack: sixty minis in 42-48U.

Sonnet's RackMac mini[1] puts two unmolested minis in a short 1U enclosure: sixty minis in 30U. A web search turns up the Apple Mac Mini Relay Rack Shelf[2] from RackSolutions, which has four minis in a full 1U enclosure.

I'm willing to believe that there are cooling and airflow advantages to the sleds, although those two small fans at the back of the sled don't look too exciting. The biggest advantage seems to be cable management and the ease of sliding out a single mini at a time.

One comment on the video points to another video[3] about MacStadium, which mounts minis sideways on what look like library shelves.

[1] https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html

[2] https://www.racksolutions.com/mac-mini-shelf.html

[3] https://youtu.be/0b46E4mp_V8

[leehuffman]

> I somehow expected more density for a custom arrangement like this. One eviscerated mini per sled, ten sleds per rackmount chassis, six chassis per rack: sixty minis in 42-48U.

If Apple isn't willing to manufacture an off-the-shelf offering, what did you expect? That's... pretty dense...

As far as off-the-shelf desktop things turned in-house rack mount sled chassis builds go, 60 Minis in 48U (with _all_ the supporting bits – multiple network switches etc) is pretty damn good?

> I'm willing to believe that there are cooling and airflow advantages to the sleds

Nah the benefits are all management, maintenance, and isolation. Not to mention the sled chassis providing A/B power feed support, IPMI-esque management from the host chassis for each sled, etc etc. The benefits are massive and have nothing to do with cooling/airflow.

> although those two small fans at the back of the sled don't look too exciting.

I can assure you those 40mm fans _scream_.

> The biggest advantage seems to be ~~cable management~~ and the ease of sliding out a single mini at a time.

Bingo. Single sled failure and the ability to swap to a spare/repair the broken one outside of production by pressing your thumb on a trigger and pulling towards you. Huge win vs the off-the-shelf 'rack your factory Mini in this metal cage on rack rails' scenario.

Not to mention you now have the ability to assign jobs/builds intelligently at a sled/host chassis level. Isolation & proper distribution of jobs at that granularity (and cabinet, power phase feed consumption, A/B feeds, cabinet row(s), etc) is very valuable. This shit is really, really dope.

[prettyStandard]

I agree it's nuts and wasteful. It seems like Microsoft & Apple could come up with an arrangement to reduce their waste.

[Maxious]

Even AWS tucks mac minis into a rack https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-m2-pro-mac-i...

Perhaps a policy holdover from the late 90s https://www.wired.com/1997/09/apple-kills-clone-market/

[washadjeffmad]

If you take the innards out of any model Mac and 3D print your own mounts, you can get some crazy density. There's basically nothing in them.

[JKCalhoun]

Apple did once sell 1U server racks [1]. I assume the reason they no longer sell these is because the market has spoken.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve