One of the most impressive collections of Macs that I have ever seen
... and it's owned by none other than Microsoft! Didn't expect that, did you?
David Weiss of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft has created a
virtual tour of the MS Mac test lab, and I have to say it is nothing short of stunning (be sure to also check out the related
questions and answers post).
While the tone of the post is informal fun rather than heavy technical discussion, you can get some interesting insights into running a very large Mac lab and dealing with deployment issues from reading both those posts and the comments around them. Automated deployment and test systems are the order of the day here.,
David actually talks about how Microsoft's test lab are using
Mac Mini computers for testing due to the ability to pack 'em in at a high density, and low running costs per unit. This is actually quite an interesting point. If you are working on a Unix type project which tends to scale out(1) rather than scale up(2), then perhaps you should be considering the Mac Mini as your platform?
Anyway, check out the post and be sure to click on
all his photos and see what you think. I see David talks about tours for MVPs in his post... While I'm not a Mac MVP or anything, I'll have to see if there is a way to get on one of these tours next time I'm in Seattle. How about it David?
(1)
Scale Out means to increase the performance of your application by running it on large amounts of lower powered systems.
(2)
Scale Up means to increase the performance of your application by running it on small amounts of very very powerful systems.