I'm a big user of high-density travel friendly computing power. And I've been criss-crossing the country with five Mac Minis in a Zuka cart for close to a year now. (I'm the guy you never want to be behind in the security line at the airport, but I can completely disassemble this whole cart in a matter of minutes.)

I came across this post from the Infinite Loop Ars Technica blog that discusses the merits of using Mac Mini's as cheap high density web servers.  The article goes on to say that Minis are several times faster then G5 XServers, you can fit 24 in a 4U space and they only use about .37 amps of power!  Not bad for a Core Duo machine that only costs around $1K....

What's more interesting is the comment about how the Mini wouldn't be a very reliable server because it doesn't have any redundancy built in.  Well have I got some news for Luke!  Why buy expensive hardware based redundancy? Put an application fabric on the stack of Minis and you have an instant reliable mini-cluster with software based load balancing and multi-machine transactional monitoring for every request that is processed by the fabric!

Until next time...

Mark