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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.
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.
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
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