Apple kills the Xserve, is Lion Server an endangered species?

Wow. As of January 31st, the Xserve will be no more.  After almost a decade (it was introduced in 2002), Apple will no longer have a rack mounable server product unless you consider things like MacMini Colo a rack mountable solution.

The Enterprise business really never took off for Apple and besides some brief notoriety for their G5 Supercomputers in the middle part of the decade, Apple’s Xserves never really stood out in the greater enterprise community.  Although they looked good and were great machines, they were expensive for their performance.

This will be a big blow to the businesses that use Macs as servers, but like everything else, Apple likely sees these businesses moving to the cloud for their Apple server needs.  Perhaps we’ll see a MobileMe Enterprise edition coming out of North Carolina?

On the hardware side, businesses that would have otherwise bought an Xserve will be forced into buying Mac Pros or Minis…unless Apple decides to license its Server software to someone else.  But we’re not even sure there will be a new version of OSX Server.

Does this also put 10.7 Lion Server on the endangered species list?

All we can say is: RIP to the best looking 1U Rack mountable server out there.  It was always especially interesting to open them up and see how Apple arranged those motherboards, hard drives and other equipment in two dimensions.  :(

Via MacGenration and MacRumors.