I remember a few years back I ran across a firm that would take your Mac Mini and colocate it for you in a datacenter. At the time I thought the idea was “cute” and figured some small businesses may consider that for that client server based Mac App that some business would be running.

I hadn’t really thought much more about it until I realized that running dual monitors and tons of apps for 14 hours a day on my 4 year old MacBook Pro was starting to take a toll on it when I decided I would use the MBP for traveling, working on the terrace or working just away from my desk. I considered the iMac  but I already owned 3 monitors and couldn’t justify the iMac and the Mac Pro was just overkill. I settled on the Mac Mini and now I know why there are firms out their that colocate these amazing machines.

First of all, I got the 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM model which I thought would be power starved. Actually it’sresponsive, boots up lightning fast and really takes a beating daily without showing any signs of slow down. Not only do I run lots of applications at once, but instead of 2 monitors, I pulled out a 3rd that I had stored and now run 3 monitors on the Mac Mini without any performance hits. (If you are wondering how, the Mini has HDMI which I’ve converted to DVI and it has a mini-display port which I’ve also converted to DVI. The last monitor was connected with a display link adapter that converts one of my USB ports to a DVI port.)

I could definitely see with 4GB or perhaps even 8GB’s of RAM that this small machine could be an excellent server in a datacenter while barely consuming power and space. This whole thing got me to thinking about a company called Sea Micro who uses small PCI board based computers to deliver 512 Intel Atom cores in a single unit. So rather than virtualizing really large servers with hundreds of virtual instances, you’d literally be able to have lots of “mini computers” in a single unit that has a really high back plane through-put for network and redundancy on all elements. So rather than splitting up large scale computers into smaller chunks, you would just buy smaller chunks of physical computing. Interesting things to consider these days