Well, it's all over the interwebs, and the death of the XServe is not greatly exaggerated. Apple has killed its last enterprise product, perhaps signaling the death knell to the professional market side of Apple completely. Just as Information Week and other "trade rags" write up Apple's gains in the enterprise world with their mobile devices, Apple puts another nail in the coffin of their enterprise business, killing their last datacenter product.
Although in theory, the replacement with a Mac Pro server is a good piece of hardware, you can't rack mount one (it takes up 12! units of rack space to stand one or two in a rack), it's missing critical hardware redundancy (dual power supplies), and the lack of quick parts replacement means you need that 12u rackspace for two Mac Pros in tandem, because when one goes down the average downtime for a hardware repair is going to be in days, not minutes or hours. As for the Mac Mini Server, it is a fine tool for small (less than 20 employees) businesses, but again not a "business-critical" tool with no real redundancy or performance. Utilizing XGrid? How about QMaster clustering? Both tools that are likely on their way to the graveyard as well, without the space-saving convenience of the rackmounted server. One has to take a long look at Final Cut Server as well - an application practically aimed at the XServe/datacenter design, and wonders how long it is until that simply fades into the background as well.
The easy argument "nobody needed the XServe" may be true, but what about the new Mobile Device Management in Snow Leopard Server? Do you think businesses are going to lose 12U of expensive, precious rack space for a pair of Mac Pros to help them manage iPhones and iPads? Not so likely in this penny-pinching IT world. Does apple think for one minute a Fortune 500 (or Fortune 100) company is going to have a tower computer sitting on someone's desk providing centralized management for those mobile devices that have been shooting up the sales charts? If so, the ivory tower at One Infinite Loop needs to look inside itself and see if that makes business sense. Taking their own infrastructure in mind, if Apple was their own biggest customer (and maybe the secret of the new datacenter is IBM Bladeservers?) Apple is hamstringing itself with the end of the XServe as well.
Tablets are great (I mean that truly), and iPhones are leading the charge into an interactive, handheld solution, but it takes a Mac to write the software for those devices, and in larger businesses, it takes a server to manage those Macs. Disconnect? Yes, and at the root of the system.
I for one hope (but don't expect) a rack-mountable Mac Pro by January 1st. Frankly, I've been expecting one since the birth of the G5. Does Apple not realize that professional customers in businesses like audio and video want (or need) those machines rack-mounted? Sadly, here what I fear are the next victims of this elimination of enterprise support:
XGrid
XSan
Final Cut Server
Apple-supported Promise SAN storage
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