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Chuck Toporek has a great article about the possibilities for the Mac Mini. The two that interest me are Mac Mini as “small” server and Mac Mini in a cluster.

I think a headless, quiet Mac Mini would make a great home server. However, anything beyond that I think is going to run up against that 256MB RAM limit. I’m certainly considering replacing my noisy Gentoo box that is prone to over-heating. I already run mysql, Apache, tinyproxy and Wordpress (to name a few) on my G5. The Mac Mini seems like it was destined for this duty (or as part of a home theatre).

With regards to clustering the Mac Mini, I think that this is a fantasy, albeit an appealing one… Heck, those little boxes scream out to be stacked! However, building a cluster is as much about power and heat management as it is about software. Plus, without RAID or (as it appears) easily swappable parts, the Mac Mini just wouldn’t survive very long. In most large clusters, the server is a commodity… the Mac Mini is too sexy to be a commodity!