I have recently bought one of the new Mac Mini Servers, partly because I like everything mac and partly because I wanted to try OS X Server for my business.

First impressions are great. Apple have taken the best (or very good) OSS and created a nice, if somewhat basic GUI to sit on top. You can of course still go and edit the configuration by hand if need be.

Unfortunately, the graphics card failed in the first unit, however Apple were very good and I had a new unit in a couple of days. This got me thinking. Normally if I wanted to send a computer back for repair or replacement I would remove the disks but with a mac mini you have to prise it open with a paint scraper. Not something I really want to be doing to a box which is still under warranty.

So, when the new one arrived, I decided to take advantage of my Netgear ReadyNAS Pro NAS box’s (of which more later) ability to do iscsi and along with the globalSAN iSCSI Initiator added disks for each service that could contain sensitive data.  This took some time to get working, mostly due to issues with the Netgear but I now have all data on hot swap mirrored disks and the mac mini could go back to apple with no sign of sensitive data.