Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by mikepurvis on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @01:11PM (#46060555)

Unlike the old rack mount options for the trashcan Mac Pro units (eg https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros), it doesn't seem like much thought has been given here to a front-to-back airflow.

I'm also surprised they're touting the density of this solution— seems like the obvious thing would be to put the Minis on their sides. A 4U chassis has 17.5cm vertical space in it, and a Mac Mini is 17cm wide. With the Mini being 2in in height, that suggests 8-9 Minis in a 4U rack, vs 2 Minis in a 2U rack for Scaleway's trays.

EDIT: Here's a commercially-available solution that's 6/4U: https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/Rack-Mount-for-6-M4-mac-min..., you'd think it could basically be this but with the management plane behind or in front. And as others have said, making the management plane be more shared, so it's not 1:1.

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by notpeter on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @02:01PM (#46061121)

This is what MacStadium does. Here's a drawer design for the previous gen intel macs:

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687e650a56916806eaaf8f62/...

You can find a bunch more detail in their related patent filings:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240397658A1/en?q=(%22m...

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by mikepurvis on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @02:42PM (#46061524)

I was thinking the units all face the front in a shallow drawer, whereas MS is doing a deep drawer, which is almost certainly even better for density.

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by averageRoyalty on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @03:06PM (#46061766)

For anyone reading along at home, 2 inches is just over 5cm.

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by mikepurvis on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @03:15PM (#46061855)

Yeah sorry for mixing units like that. I think of it as a 19" rack and know that refers to the width, but I had to look up the height of a 4U chassis and Google told it to me in cm, so then I went with that for that dimension.

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by averageRoyalty on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @04:19PM (#46062444)

Totally fine, my brain just isn't used to processing imperial measurements in the same sentence as metric, so I thought the conversion might help others in the same place!

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by tecleandor on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @01:55PM (#46061043)

Yep! I would have thought about doing a 3d printed "tray" that goes under the mini and routes front/cold and back/hot air to the exterior of the rack...

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by jabberwhookie on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @05:32PM (#46063111)

> Each rack can hold up to 96 Mac minis,

Sounds like 2 per 1U to me. I think it's power efficiency that limits filling a rack with typical 1U servers in most plans. The power efficiency here is probably not really impressive enough given so many power units, etc.

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Re:Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–... by mikepurvis on Thursday November 27, 2025 @10:02AM (#46069872)

Yeah I'm a bit confused on that. In the picture, each row is definitely taller than the power strip, plus 1U is 44.45mm in height, whereas the current-gen Mac Mini is 50mm high.

I'm pretty sure the drawers are 2U, but given that I don't know how they would get 96 nodes in a standard 42U rack.

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