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Xinet Benchmark

I admit I'm a tad skeptical of the relevance of this benchmark, but it does seem that Apple has a nice system. I suspect you could roll your own better with OpenBSD or Linux and a nice AMD multiprocessor system. That's just me though. And realistically a lot of businesses DON'T want such systems. They want a "come as it is" system. Further a lot of people don't want all the messing around that you have to do with most Linux of BSD distributions. Apple has put a very nice interface on their server. Yet you have the added benefit of being able to drop to Unix when necessary.

Apple's big problem is still the chipset used with the G4's. Given that, despite many of the nice features, unless you are primarily serving other Macs, I don't think XServe is a good choice. If you have people with Unix backgrounds then I think FreeBSD or OpenBSD is better. And for many ASP systems Sun is the clear winner. However keep watch on Apple if IBM manages to restore hardware parity for Apple. I think that as a server OSX will mature quickly.

Each IDE drive has it's own controller however, so the performance is better.

Apple Drive Modules use 7200rpm ATA/100 hard disk drives. Each drive has an independent Ultra ATA/100 bus, an arrangement that allows maximum individual drive performance without choking the throughput of the other drives. The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.

Apple's point in using IDE drives was the cost. You can get an XServe with more capacity than the other 1U racks, and for a LOT less money.

You can have 480GB of storage per XServe. $7,799.00 for the dual 1GHz version with 480GB and 2.0GB DDR SDRAM @ 266MHz. Price some other system with the same specs.

They do have a RAID coming out, and nothing is stopping you from adding a SCSI RAID PCI card.

The XServe was made because some companies (like Gentec) wanted smaller G4 servers.

Check out some XServe benchmarks: Xinet

No it wont, that's just you saying it, and you don't count for much.

The problem scales badly too.

Poorly, not badly. Remember, Mac users are more intelligent! ;)

The top end Dual G4 get's [gets] it's clock cleaned by $1500 worth of commodity x86 hardware. So on the high end, you end up paying a $2000 Apple$oft tax for OS X.

Whatever.

Apple's dual 1GHz Xserve was a top performer among dual-CPU machines in recent Xinet benchmarks, edging Dell's dual 1.4GHz PowerEdge 1650 Server in tests. The Xserve, along with other competing servers from companies such as SGI and Sun, were tested in both "Output Generation" and "Photoshop Open" tests.

And you still have to use a poor excuse for an OS.

As long as you keep slobbering after each new shiny mac, reguardless [regardless] of how outdated the hardware is, Jobs will continue to sell you crap and charge you extra for the "privlage".[privilege]

As I said yesterday, I don't have to have each shiny new Mac, unlike you, who has to make up for your personality disorder by running out and buying the latest PC hardware, because it becomes obsolete in three weeks. ;) Also, I can afford Apple hardware, so I'm not too worried about it.

For the good of apple, there needs to be a groundswell of dissent among the apple loyalists. When apple's fanatic user base stops shining Jobs' knob, he will decide to put some hardware reaserch and developement [research and development] dollars into something besides a circuit to give the white LED power indicator 300 levels of fade.

Name a PC maker that spends as much as Apple does on R&D. I'll wait.

Apple is a tech survivor Wendell Perkins, manager of the JohnsonFamily mutual funds, says that Apple is a tech survivor along with Oracle and Microsoft, according to CNN/Money: "though Apple has been struggling lately (it issued an earnings warning earlier this month), Perkins thinks that the stock is worth a look because it is the only innovative company in the personal computer sector. Apple spent about 7.5 percent of its revenue in the last quarter on research and development, a higher percentage than Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard."

Or you can predict apple's demise as their hardware becomes 3 years obsolete then 4. At this rate, in 5 years there will be a better processor in your microwave than in your computer.

Unlike companies such as Dell and Gateway, who only have commodity hardware to sell, Apple is not just about their hardware. People purchase Macs because it's a system, and will keep purchasing them regardless. You can spend $16k on a Sun running at 800MHz... I don't hear you saying Sun is going out of business. The demise of Apple has been predicted by much smarter than the likes of you since the 1980's!

Yawn!! Why don't you do some R&D on spelling and grammar!

I hate reading that such-and-such has released statistics showing that xyz is faster than abc, when I know next to nothing about such-and-such.

So wondering what I could find out quickly:

According to their homepage:

"...Xinet is the leading developer of prepress networking software. ..."
(http://www.xinet.com/)

and if you go looking for it - '2002 testing details' (deeplink: http://www.xinet.com/benchmarks/benchmarks.2002/bm . etails.html):

"...Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations measure network throughput by Macintosh clients opening and saving Photoshop files stored on the server..."

Given who they are (a company who makes software for an Industry Apple has a significant presence in) and how they test (using Macintosh clients) how they obtained their benchmark results (and why photoshop gets in to them) is a little easier to understand.

(I have to wonder if this is why Apple Keynotes have photoshop demos to show off their hardware - they're focusing on /selling to one of their key markets...)

I hate reading that such-and-such has released statistics showing that xyz is faster than abc, when I know next to nothing about such-and-such.

So wondering what I could find out quickly:

According to their homepage:

"...Xinet is the leading developer of prepress networking software. ..."
(http://www.xinet.com/)

and if you go looking for it - '2002 testing details' (deeplink: http://www.xinet.com/benchmarks/benchmarks.2002/bm . etails.html):

"...Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations measure network throughput by Macintosh clients opening and saving Photoshop files stored on the server..."

Given who they are (a company who makes software for an Industry Apple has a significant presence in) and how they test (using Macintosh clients) how they obtained their benchmark results (and why photoshop gets in to them) is a little easier to understand.

(I have to wonder if this is why Apple Keynotes have photoshop demos to show off their hardware - they're focusing on /selling to one of their key markets...)

"Why not just let those users that have a need to send large files to each other do it with email."

Actually, that's what I do. We have a prepress-specific email address set up that our customers use for emailing files to us. WE have no attachment restrictions or limits. It's the limitations that customers may have that give us fits.

Well, I do have storage limits for individual users' email accounts, here. But not for the prepress account in particular.

If I were to be totally honest, the email solution works well. What I don't "get" is why FTP is seemingly so difficult for our customers to grasp. I read the posts about scripting the FTP uploads, etc. But I don't think it should be necessary to further simplify something that is already very simple. I've used command-line, CuteFTP and Fetch and they're just not that difficult to use. And I ain't all that bright.

"Maintaining seperate accounts on the ftp server for their customers is possible, but really not that practical. Email is a better solution."

Now here's a situation that I thankfully don't have to deal with. So far, we haven't had customers request any more privacy than our one general non-anonymous user logon (all of our customers use the same username and pass.) They can see each other's files when they're using our FTP site. (We get more sensitive jobs on CD or other media.)

But I can see where this could be an issue in the future for us and how a magazine would definitely want separate user accounts. We're also going to a "soft" on-line proofing system that will require individual user logons.

One company that has a printing-specific solution for this is Xinet with their WebNative application (or suite of applications.) It's literally been years since I read/heard/had a clue about Xinet's offerings, but I will probably have to get up to speed here very soon.