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Apple Introduces Xserve Rackmount Servers
2nd Post! writes "MacCentral is reporting the announcement of 1U Apple rackmount hardware. The Xserve, despite its cheesy name, seems quite powerful: dual G4/1GHz with 4MB DDR L3 cache, up to 2GB DDR (yes!) SDRAM, 4 ATA drive bays (up to 480GB), 2 Gb Ethernet ports, 2 64/66 PCI slots (one of which may be taken up by one Gb Ethernet card), and, of course, FireWire. Pricing starts at $2,999 for a single 60GB disk and 256MB RAM." Yahoo! has posted the press release; Doc Searls is writing about Jobs' speech. Update: 05/14 18:14 GMT by M : Apple's page about the Xserve is now live.
After reading the current information on the new Apple server (the XServe) I'm noticing more then a few problems with the first Apple server since the end of AI/X. Pros: 1U, this is sweet. I was expecting a 2U system. This will make for a very nice high density server farm. 266mhz DDR memory. About time. 4 hard disk bays. Dual gigabit ethernet. Cons: No redundant power supply. No ECC memory. Current price is looking like 1000$ for an extra 256megs of Apple blessed DDR RAM. I'm hopping this is a typo. IDE hard disks. Quote the Jobs "We're going with ATA because they're just as fast as SCSI and they offer real benefits in term of largest capacities.". How dumb does Jobs think we are? IDE just as fast as SCSI my ass. Any real world comparison of a top of the line IDE drive VS SCSI shows SCSI winning. No expansion slots. The second gigabit network card takes up the only PCI slot. Compare this to the DELL 1650 which has on board SCSI RAID, dual gigabit and two 64bit PCI slots at a starting price of under 1500$ and I have to wonder what Apple is thinking here.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
this might be a silly question, but why would someone want a gui on a rack computer? it's not like you will be sitting in front of this thing. i would think it is the gui of your workstation with which you should be concerned.
-- john
At $3,000 maybe I should buy one of these things for my next computer instead of that TiBook. BTW, for those of you students (college or otherwise out there) sign up for Apple's student developer package ($99) and get a once in a lifetime discount on Apple hardware good for up to 20% off whatever you buy. Knocks the high end TiBook down from 3,800 to 3,000. I wonder what it would do for the rackmount?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Its not a RAID server, its a external storage unit, you'll need to plug into a server... using the fibre channel connections...
Its a RAID box, IDE drives, Fibre channel backhaul....
Apple is doing alot right... IDE veruses SCSI - IDE is right for what they're doing (small servers), on the RAID box, I'd go SCSI. I think as they build out thier server lines, they'll build some with SCSI some with IDE...
IDE can be as fast as SCSI, but you can't get 15K RPM IDE drives, you can with SCSI, and SCSI drives are assumed to be run 24x7, IDE isn't... (Although that doesn't mean IDE drives can't last as long, just SCSI drives are designed for more use)...
This may not be immediately obvious, but the low power requirements of the g4 chip can provide a big advantage here.
From apple's site: Typical continuous power: 125W (single-processor system); 175W (dual processor system).
On a desktop, this doesn't make that huge of a difference, but when you fill a room full of these rackmounts, the electricity savings quickly being to add up. Then you can figure in cooling costs. Lower power consumption results in less generated heat and far lower cooling bills.
If I understand correctly, this is a signficant differentiator between Apple's offerings and companies providing Windows XP on their servers. This is because the hardware OEM would have to negotiate a great deal with Microsoft to do a similar "unlimited deal". Either that, or they'd have to absorb the costs, an unlikely scenario.
Of course, the hardware OEM could install Linux instead, but we all know that Microsoft generally frowns on OEMs picking between Windows and Linux:
Source was eWeek, March 18, 2002.
So, if Apple sees any sort of success with Xserve, you'll probably see the other OEMs putting pressure on Microsoft to let them offer Linux or at least reduce their Windows licensing fees, meaning more, cheaper choices for the customers.
I guess competition is good after all.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
the point of a mac server? for those in education, it's a no-brainer to use - especially compared to Windows NT / 2000.
for Video and graphics, it means you can rackmount these puppies and use them as a rendering farm almost right out of the box.
And for design houses, it's an easy way to adminster a network, set up file and sharing services, etc..
Is it going to run amazon.com? Nope. That's not the market.
You don't (and frankly neither do I) but I can see quite a few people who do. I don't think the hardware is going to be the selling issue here (although they'll want it to be solid and somewhat competitive) but the administration tools. I can only speculate from what has been written and past remote admin software from Apple, but I bet the selling point will be how easy it is to administer the things. With any luck they'll do to server administration what they did to the Unix desktop, i.e. make it easy.
/. crowd) but for things like schools, graphics departments, etc. this could *potentially* free up administration costs since you don't have to have a unix propeller head around part or all of the time.
A cheaper 1U AMD based server box with FreeBSD or Slackware may be cheaper and just as easy to administer for you and I (and most of the
Exactly.. this is a pretty big deal. Between the whole "look, a server OS that a half-idiot can configure with reasonable licensing policies" thing and the tools that seem to provide remote administration done right (apple remote desktop and this crazy looking manager thing, apple seems to have suddenly gotten a bunch of stuff right that no one ever quite has before.
.. this could definitely turn into a real, credible threat to windows XP.
I can only just hope and pray with all my might that apple doesn't let this opportunity slipt hrough their fingers. I mean, this isn't the most impressive box i've ever seen, esp. compared to some high-end UNIX setups, and traditional Unices probably still are more reliable and powerful for some stuff, but the tradeoffs you have to go through with this XServe are certainly no more unreasonable than the ones that early or even sometimes current versions of Windows NT make you go through. If Apple keeps developing this, and they *market* it, and they actually push this in those markets where this is actually something killer (all the ease of Windows NT without the bullshit, the constant reboots, the downtime, the requirements to buy like four redundant servers to make anything work, or the need foran MSCE)
And if this gets developed, it would be a very good thing for linux and UNIX in general, because anywhere that picks up this thing is going to be naturally gravitated toward J2EE and UNIX-based SQL software.. and after awhile, they'll begin to realize linux is a drop-in replacement in some places for this. Any mindshare that this Xserve thing picks up translates to instant mindshare for everything UNIX.. becuase that's just one more shop that has expertise in Apache, Perl, etc, instead of expertise in IIS, ASP, etc...
Please, please, apple, don't fuck this one up. If they play your cards right, they could take over the world with this one. This could be the first step to making Macs seem usable or credible in a university/business environment.. if they can get a serious foothold with this.. i don't even know.
This makes me incredibly, incredibly happy. It's very exciting. It's just too bad apple will probably not market it correctly and we'll wind up with something that just slips through the cracks and never catches on, another product that was technically neat but no one used. Now i just want to know how long it will take LinuxPPC to put together a bootable package for the XServe..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You say you can get a server from Dell with RAID for less, and you run Win2000?
Hmmm. Since Win2000 will charge you $3295 for unlimited users, that means you must be able to get a Dell for $605? I looked on the Dell website and couldn't find a $605 server.
Oh, and the Xserve DOES have raid.
Seriously, you run Windows, you pay the user tax and you're concerned about cost- when your user tax is almost as much as the complete server from Apple?
This is a really competitive server from a hardware standpoint. When you include the software costs (and you did since you run Win2000) there is no comparison.
Your alternative is at least twice the cost (And when I go to the Dell website their servers are a lot more expensive than the Xserve for less CPU horsepower and multiple-rack units.)
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I hate to defend Apple, but its obvious the value you are seeing elsewhere and bitching about here cos it is Oh so trendy to pick on Apple.
What fun, yet as blockquoth from above:
That's a nicely done Quicktime movie though: note that it's interactive: you can actually click on the tabs. Try it!
Firstly, hats off to Apple. It looks good (and that is a selling point, especially in design companies). It has enough power, the group of researchers (there was a story here on them wanting to use G4's but the tower couldn't be stacked) can now stack them. And above all (this is redundant, has been posted already) the admin software and unlimited seats licence will be selling points in those places (schools, design companies etc) where there is no one who has the technical capability to setup a linux box (and the Cobalts from Sun are not very good in terms of software admin and cost more with far less power) who probably thought that they were stuck with Windows servers.
Nice to see that Apple has finally introduced DDR. means that this will trickle down to the desktop sonner or later.
Hmmm, for $20K I can buy 5 dual processor Apple Servers and fit them in the same 5 Us of rack space. That's 10 CPUs, 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 5 unit redundancy, 10 GBs of RAM and space for 2.4 TBs of HD...
What was your point again?
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Firewire sounds like a good way to attach a CD-R or tape drive for backups.
...makes all the difference in the world. Space considerations are a major issue in servers. Anyone can build a 2U unit. Building a 1U unit that stays cool and is still serviceable, that's the trick.
Check out various server websites sometime: you'll note that the 1U models are generally significantly more expensive than equivalent 2U models.
On the Design Page:
"Fits in with what's out there:
"Xserve fits into all types of industry-standard racks, so you can use what you already have or buy new racks "off-the-rack" to meet your specific needs. There's no need for a special "Apple rack."
Xserve supports racks that meet the specifications of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/Electronic Industries Association (EIA) standard ANSI/EIA-310-D, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 297, and Deutsche Industrie Norm (DIN) 41494. You can install the server in any of several types of racks, including: open four-post rack (19 inches wide and 29 -- 36 inches deep), cabinet with four-post rack inside (19 inches wide and 29 -- 36 inches deep), and two-post telco rack (19 inches wide).
I think this new attitude -- along with the list of nice features -- will go over well here in higher ed. I'm considering getting one of these and putting it in our co-location center. I've used the Server Admin on my in-house G4 server, and it's great for remote admin, too. But all of the admin tools alone would sell me over a different brand. A Linux 1U would be cheaper initially, but it costs something in time to maintain, too. I don't have the time and resources to hire a sys admin. I've got to do that myself, and it's not a lot of fun. This would be perfect.
Funny, all I see is people calling him on his incomplete grasp of Sun's product line. That's Apple zealotry?
Geez... if you wanna post someone else's opinion of Apple, at least have the balls to just say it without making up the excuse that you're riding to the rescue of someone beset zelots.
And actually giving a shit about your account being "smited," is pretty damn sad. Just say what you will out in the open. Whining about conserving your precious karma just makes me think you've not got much to say that people find interesting in the first place.
As far as I know, there are no Linux Mac Manager servers.
-braxton
makes a lot more sense now. I was a bit surprised that they were going to be doing their rendering on a huge field of desktops. I wonder if they had any inside info that the Xserver was coming soon ;)
Apple quotes their dual processor machine as having a theoretical max of 15 gigaflops.
;-)
Yep, but that's simply BS. Those 15 gflops are only achievable if you stick to single precision altivec, and only execute combined multiply-add instructions.
The TOP500 is sorted by double precision LINPACK performance. In double precision the dual Apple box has a peak performance of 1-2 gflops (1 gflop if we have to load each number from memory), so you would need 6500-13000 modules, not 820.
OK. So how are you going to connect your 551000 rack units? Gigabit ethernet? That would be quite an expensive switch! And your latency and bandwidth would still SUCK compared to an IBM.
If you knew anything about massively parallel machines you'd know that the processors account for a tiny fraction of the price - nobody buys an IBM for the total floprate, but the high-performance communication...
And you are suggestion they should run 400 terabytes of distributed storage on IDE drives using HFS+? Right...
> The Altivec unit is nice for vectorizable single-precision operations, but this is
> a _VERY_ limited subset of code in general.
That happens to include audio and video processing and encoding, 3D rendering, biotech computing, encryption, and other very hip tasks for which people want more computational power these days. And yes, Apple's customers do this on servers (eg. a Web server that creates graphical maps from a database, encodes live audio or video and streams it, or processes a master movie file into lower bitrate versions for certain clients, etc.) Will Altivec speed up Microsoft Word? No. Does it need speeding up on today's machines? Not usually. But Altivec is heavily used by apps that run on PPC and need juice and it shouldn't be discounted like it's Intel's MME or something. People who know Altivec love Altivec, let's put it that way.
Apple didn't release a rack mount system years ago
I don't think this would have been too practical without Mac OS X in its current form.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If you notice, one of the BTO options is A SCSI CARD!
So, you only configure it with one ATA drive (for the system), you add the SCSI card option then buy a SCSI drive rack and hook them up... RIGHT?
Or (this is not for the faint of heart) - *hack* the drive bays to support a SCSI configuration...
Disclaimer: This comment was generated by a Flock of Trained Microsoft Programmers for Aqua_Geek.
It's not quite as bad as you make it out. Each ATA drive has its own controller which will perk up the speed nicely thank you very much.
The Dell 1650 has room for 3 drives max, with a max size of 73Gb each. If you're in a linux shop, it'll be a bit less expensive but if you add cost of Microsoft's OS + equivalent server apps the Dell is many thousands of dollars over the Apple price.
Apple's offering unlimited client licenses on this baby with an interface that will make it easy to integrate into a windows shop. You can have 0.48T on this baby and it can sport two Gigabyte ethernet links. If you're just serving 1000 users email (not a problem for a unit of this capability) you are saving many thousands of $US in CAL costs.