Design + Build | Think different
Not just stacks of Macs in racks
Sebastian Moss Deputy Editor
MacStadium runs Apple hardware in its data centers. That’s a surprisingly sensible thing to do, Sebastian Moss discovers
T
here's no reason to use Apple hardware at the bottom of your private cloud, unless you have to.” Shawn Lankton, chief revenue officer of MacStadium, is honest about why his company exists. It’s not there to compete with standard colocation companies on cost, latency or geographic distribution. Instead, he hopes to target a very specific niche: “We exist because Apple requires their customers to work with Mac infrastructure at the bottom of their stack. And that's not our call, that's just a problem that we endeavor to solve.
“We have come up with technology, infrastructure, expertise, best practices to make that possible, easily and at scale.”
Targeting companies that need to use the Mac OS, such as Xcode app developers, MacStadium operates server racks full of tens of thousands of Mac computers across five data center locations - Atlanta, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, Frankfurt and Dublin. Primarily, MacStadium uses private suites in Equinix and Zayo data centers, but has a small footprint in a Keppel facility in Dublin. "We have plans of getting to Asia in the near future and launching additional
points of presence," Lankton said. "But we don't really need to be within 50 miles of a customer for them to have a good experience, because the use case is not super latency dependent. “If you're sending a build or a test job to one of our data centers, that may be a three minute or a three hour job. And so if it takes an extra few milliseconds to travel to the data center, that doesn't really impact the performance or the user experience." As a business, the company started “with a bare metal offering of Mac minis and Mac Pros,” Kevin Beebe, MacStadium’s VP of product management & security, told DCD.
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