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.

Comments

Pretty powerful...

[Justen]

I imagine this is going to be a hit with universities, especially those that already use Macintosh client units.

I think the RAID server that they announced (not shipping until later) will be pretty hot, too...

- 3U height
- 14 bays
- Fourteen 120 gB ATA drives (hot pluggable)
- 1.68 tB
- dual 2GB Fibre Channel on system
- 400 mB/second storage throughput

At $3,000, this is a fairly good solution. I just wonder what this "repair kit" will include??

jrbd

So the Sun/SGI/whatever rumors are dying now

[line-bundle]

So does that mean the constant rumour of Apple buying (or bought by) Sun/SGI/whatnot will die now? Clearly Apple can make its own servers.

BTW Why did they choose ATA drives over SCSI?

Re:So the Sun/SGI/whatever rumors are dying now

[Lysander Luddite]

But look at Apple's target markets:
Education, Creative, Biotech, Video. Are these markets people that want to rely on IT and support? I don't think Apple is competing against Sun or SGI. Seems pretty clear they are offering a UNIX alternative for people who don't want to have to know UNIX to me.

Certainly no big challenge to large database companies nor Windows Enterprises.

Re:So the Sun/SGI/whatever rumors are dying now

[MoneyT]

Cost. SCSI costs much more, meaning a higher price. However, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to include a built in SCSI interface.

Oracle 9i Too!

[rgraham]

This wasn't mentioned in the press release but seems like a pretty big deal and come from the MacCentral coverage: "Introduces Mike Rocha, senior vice president, Platform Tech, Oracle: Oracle 9i on OS X -- we very excited about this hardware. Oracle is about low-cost clustering. Future releases will be on-time, synchronous. When we use UNIX native support, native APIs, optimized for this hardware, we can synchronize our releases so that our customers can have unified database versions across different hardware platforms. "

one step forward, two steps back?

[tps12]

I can't believe it. Apple finally emerges from the stone age and leaves PC100 RAM behind, and sticks IDE drives in a server case.

Well, I'm disappointed. Everything else about this looks really nice, obviously.

Hm, thinking about famous systems that use IDE drives...think they're trying to appeal to Google?

Re:Did They Fix the Filename Problem Yet?

[Etcetera]

FYI: That's the way HFS/HFS+ is designed, it's a case-preserving, but case-insensitive system.

This has been written about in ARSTechnica and other good interface-analysis sites.

Frankly, this is a GOOD thing. There's no reason the user/sysadmin needs to have case-distinguishable file names. A filename's purpose is to serve as an identifiable label which a human can recognize the file by. There's no good reason why "readme" and "README" should refer to two separate files. If you have two readme files, they should be named differently.

The case-preserving aspect is important because it reminds all involved that the user is in control, not the OS. If you want to name something "sysTEM FOLDer", the OS should identify it as such, but if someone else wants to get to the "system folder", the OS needs to be smart enough to recognize that that's what you're refering to.

Calling someone "brian smith", or "Brian Smith", or "BRIAN SMITH" doesn't change the identify of the person you're calling.

yes they did - case-sensitivity IS the problem

[ChristTrekker]

Case-sensitivity is a PITB. When you speak a filename to someone, how does the difference in capitalization sound? Apple took the user-oriented solution of making case irrelevant. The only people that presume that case-sensitivity in something as accessible as the filename is a good thing are geeks. If we want our source code to be case-sensitive, fine. As far as filenames go, "CT Stuff" and "ct stuff" should mean the same thing. Making case the only difference between two names is as bad as calling your variables x instead of millisecondsBeforeShuttleLaunch.

Some may dismiss this as pandering to "lusers". Yet case-sensitivity makes your life harder, too. Claiming it's a desirable feature is just a way of trying to show off how 31337 you are. No one's impressed that you can type mixed-case filenames. The rest of us just want to get work done.

Picture of inside

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html

New version of Mac OS X Server too...

[ptimmons]

If you look closely at the Quicktime animation on the page describing the Server Management software, one of the frames shows that the server is running Mac OS X Server 10.1.5.

What the fuck is Apple smoking?

[Wakko Warner]

They're positioning this server (according to MacWorld) against, among other things, Sun's 280R.

Let's see here:

The 280R has dual redundant power supplies, can have up to 4 CPUs, gigabytes more memory, is SCSI-based, and, since it's 5RU, has a ton more expandability.

The main comparison point Apple chose to use? Available disk bays, and price. Who do they think they're fooling when they claim that an IDE-based XServer will be comparable to a $20k enterprise-ready server?

Man, the crack in Cupertino must be good.

- A.P.

Re:What the fuck is Apple smoking?

[zmalone]

Last I heard, the 280R was the lowest end rackable UltraSPARC III machine. Comparing 1ghz G4s to Netra T1s, which are in a similar price category would be a more cost concious comparison, although the T1s would be butchered. Oh yeah, and the 280R has 2 processors, not 4.

Re:What the fuck is Apple smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I see the wrath of the Apple Zealotry (tm, Pat. Pending) has already smitten you.

It seems that they have zero tolerance for anything even slighty critical of their precious Apple (tm). When will these losers wake up and smell the coffee?

I think Neal Stephenson said it best in his In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?

It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did. "I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a respectable business transaction).

So it's not so much that the crack in Cupertino is so great, it's the crack that the Apple Zealots (tm) smoke that perpetuates this shit (buying a piece of Apple(tm) hardware makes you cool)!

Posted anonymously to prevent the same smiting of my account

Re:What the fuck is Apple smoking?

[MoneyT]

Except you got it all wrong. Demanding control over your hardware and software is not a bad thing. When will you people learn that the most sucessful people are the people that demand control. Don't believe me, let's start a list:

Bill Gates: insists on control of the OS industry. Why? Not definative, but theoreticaly he want's a universal standard of operations on computers.

James Cameron (think Terminator and Titanic): Known as being a very demending director who knows and insists on having what he wants. The result is a stream of rather sucessful movies.

Steve Jobs: Until he came back, Apple was floundering because they were trying to please everyone and offer everything. This was simply dumping money and killing the business. Jobs came back and had insisted on direct control over the mac. Ergo, end of clones and only 3 or 4 options per group of macs.

Control is not a bad thing. Abuse is a bad thing.

BTW, using a mac and using a PC are two very different experiences, give it a try one day and you might be suprised.

Posted anonymously to prevent the same smiting of my account

You'll take the credit for posting that which is in accordance with the opinions of moderators and the majority (goodthink), but you will hide behind a viel of anonmminity when you are going to be contrary. Coward.

Pixar

[rjamestaylor]

This announcement explains Pixar's move to OS X. How else could a render farm on OS X be space-effective?

Re:Great differentiator

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can't react quite as quickly, though, becuase they don't sell directly to the customer in this particular case. They have to sell through the OEM..

The PC OEM wouldn't be buying an apple XServer. it would be more along the lines of
OEM: "Well if you don't lower the prices, we're going to lose a bunch of business to the Apple XServer."
.. and if 300 OEMs are saying this at once, Microsoft may or may not react in a drastic manner immediately. At the least, this may give Apple enough time to get a foot in the door and get the XServe widely known within the industry, meaning they may even get to a position where MSXP is forced to compete against OSX based solely on the merits of the individual products (a nightmare for MS..). Or, what we may even see happening is that the OEMs find they're losing business to the XServe, and instead of trying to haggle with M$ they just switch to BSD instead...

Maybe. But probably not.

Re:I don't get it - for me, quality

[victim]

For me, having a quality hardware product with a reasonably secure OS that just works on it is the attraction.

The last batch of 6 1U x86 rackmount servers I bought from one of the largest PC manufacturers came with misprogrammed APICs that made them unable to run Linux without spending several days on hackery to get them going. The PCI slots are still useless, they can't deliver interrupts, but the rest of the machine works. I shuttled machines around so they don't need their PCI slots. (This machine was not purchased with Windows, it was a no-OS machine.) Two of these machines have failed in the 6 months that I have owned them.

The previous batch of 2U servers I purchased had a whiz-bang scsi controller that displayed a linux allergy and took me weeks of trying pre-release patches and waiting to get a linux version that worked acceptably. I still have to build custom kernels for these machines when I upgrade.

The biggest problem I have purchasing PC hardware is there is no good way to tell what is "server grade" and what has cheaped out components in the power supply or capacitors that will cause their MTBF to suffer. The extreme price pressure always tempts the manufacturers to cut corners.

So, the attactions...

• Apple (with a couple of stunning counterexamples (AppleIII, first Airports, some monitors)) was an outstanding reputation for making high grade hardware.
  
• The OS is going to work correctly on the hardware.
  
• If I like the machine, I will be able to order more identical machines 6 months later.
  
• I will not be rolling the dice to see if my OS will run on the new hardware.
  
• The firewire ports will work. Even with two processes hitting the same disk at the same time.

Ok, they cost about 30% more than the servers I have been buying (and certainly outperforms them, but that is irrelevant, my servers are low cpu users). I'll take that. It vanishes in the unbilled hours dealing with mystery hardware and having to buy a bunch of spare machines to count on being able to replace a machine when needed.

Why all this hubbub over the Xserver???

[Prolapsed Anus]

Hmmm, when Alpha Processor Inc. (API Networks) introduced the 1U dual-833Mhz EV6x Alpha CS20 over a year ago, I saw no special Slashdot story.

Granted, it was an expensive server ($8000US+)but did run Linux and NetBSD admirably.

Compaq introduced a 1U AlphaServer DS10L over TWO years ago and no Slashdot story on this either.

Slashdotters would complain that the Alpha-based servers are far too expensive so let's look to the low-end.

Sun introduced its sub-$1000US 1U Sun Fire V100 and Netra X1 servers and yet I never did see a drooling Slashdot story on either of these.

Not to mention that third-party integrators have had 1U dual Intel/AMD rackmounts for over a year as well. Nope, no major Slashdot story on the introduction of these either...

Apple comes late into the game with a non-ECC "Server" (that more closely resembles a desktop G4 stuffed into a 1U enclosure) that runs an unproven OS X (yes, unproven compared to Tru64/Digital UNIX, Solaris and even Linux/Net/FreeBSD) and Slashdotters are ecstatic.

Boy, that Kool-Aid must have been awfully refreshing.

~PA

Re:Why all this hubbub over the Xserver???

[unconfused1]

It would seem to me that they are primarily competing with companies selling Windows servers, like Dell. If you check out the web store price for a Dell PowerEdge 1650 and load it up to be similar in features to the 'custom' Apple Xserve (don't forget to add Windows 2k Svr)...you get a price of ~$7600.

That is only ~$200 less than the Xserve. So, it would seem that Apple is being pretty competitively priced. Granted there are other *nix solutions that carry a more attractive price tag, and some of them have nearly as elegant a rackcase. Looks aren't everything to Mac enthusiasts.

Re:Why all this hubbub over the Xserver???

[Anonymous Coward]

• Becuase it is a new development-- you could always get PC rackmounts, but now a machine of a totally different order, running a unique OS previously unavailable in any rackmount hardware, has become available. If the XServe goes anywhere, then it will mean that the neverending two-way battle between Windows NT and Linux/UNIX in the server/colo environment will suddenly have a third, new player, one kind of vaguely aligned with Linux/UNIX, which has the potential to change a lot of things. Therefore this qualifies as "news".
• If you have been reading the apple stories on slashdot for the last couple months, every single time that the technical merits or lackings of Mac OS X were brought up, someone pipes up and says "Gee, os x sure is neat, but I work for a university/large colo/networking corp, and I sure do wish that I could get a rack-mountable Apple box." It would appear that this is filling a need which people have been expressing on slashdot for some time.

No, this is not the most important thing to ever happen, but it is interesting, and it is assumed that those who do not find Apple news of particular note would have disabled Apple stories at this point.

I'm sure API Networks' and Compaq's alpha boxen were fantastic machines, but regardless, whatever they were like, they were more or less roughly drop-in replacements for other UNIX boxes. There is no drop-in equivilent for the XServe.

How is $6,341 better than $4000?

[BitGeek]

Apple releases a $4000 1U server and you say x86 hardware is cheaper and faster?

I'm perplexed that such mythology remains-- how can people continue to think this despite the fact that the powerPC has been beating the pentium in every reasonable performace comparison for years, and at half the cost.

The is almost a law of physics-- the PPC is a risc chip while the pentium is a risc chip with a 386 compatibility processor running emulation software. Therefore the die is a quarter the size -- which means it costs 1/8th as much and the speed is much much faster.

Hell, it even has a dedicated floating point vector unit, which the pentium doesnt (MMX was quite a failure.)

This means Apple gets faster processors for a lot less money, which allows them to release servers like this one with more performance for less money than you can get from any quality x86 manufacturer.

The Dell PowerEdge1650, the closest comperable machine from Dell, has fewer drive bays, half the drive capacity, NO-hot swappable drives, dual processors (which are SLOWER than the PowerPCs), dual gigabit ethernet, 512MB Ram, the remote management card (Which is free for apple, extra for dell), RedHat, and standard support is $6,341.00.

So, %50 more expensive with less capacity, and SLOWER PROCESSORS.

Every time apple releases new hardware, some x86 fan goes on and on about how expensive it is, and every time I make this comparison in response and find the same thing-- it costs a lot more and you get a lot less when you go Dell, Compaq, HP, etc.

Re:$2999 is for 1 Proc

[the_2nd_coming]

compair that to a 1 U dell with similer features and a 25 person licence....what about 50 or 100.

apple wins.

Top500 time?

[dbirchall]

Yeah, those are pretty nice specs. It gets a little more interesting when you take that theoretical peak performance of 630 GFlops for a rack of these babies and look at the most recent Top500 list.

A lot of us snickered when Apple pitched the G4 as a "supercomputer" (using the technical export definition), but if folks like Genentech build racks of these, clustered, and land in the top 10% of the Top500 list, Steve and company will be the ones laughing.

Let's see... the *bottom* of the Top500 list is currently a 116-CPU Cray T3E 1200, with a theoretical peak of about 139 GFlops... you'd only need enough Xserves to fill 1/4 of a rack to come up with that kind of power.

Okay, okay, I guess I want some too.

ATA over SCSI

[Pfhor]

For the price, this is amazing. the box has two 64bit/66mhz slots in it, which could probably fit two dual channel scsi160 (or 320) controller cards in it.

It's a 1U case, if I was going to do massive storage intensive tasks on it, I would plug it into a hardware raid. Like the Lacie TX12000 system, http://www.lacie.com/products/product.cfm?id=4A867 A58-54C8-11D5-97C60090278D3ED0

Which is rackmountable, and handles all the aspects of the raid itself. That way, if the server breaks, I can remove it, put a new one in its place, and keep going. (Servers support netbooting now, so I wouldn't have to change configuration). For the education / science / lets get work done crowd, this is an awesome benefit.

Since storage capacity is essential, and you can raid the drives, why not put ATA in there? Instead of scsi. If you need scsi do the above, and put them in a box dedicated to handle them.

Oh, and the machines all have RS232 ports on em.

serial console port == nice touch

[green pizza]

With Apple's recent knack for removing "legacy" ports on their machines, it's really, really nice to see that they thoughfully added a serial port on the Xserve for console access. My server farm is all Unix, and as such, I don't use a KVM, rather, I use a serial terminal server.The Xserve, with both serial and VGA would work great in any server farm environment. Kudos to Apple!

Big iron on the client side

[daviddennis]

If you're a heavy video editor and want access to a machine that's super fast and has proper cooling for lots of drives, this might be a really appealing workstation.

I'm thinking of this myself, but I'm planning to wait until the midyear introduction of new G4s. They'll probably put the best of what they've developed here into the new systems plus a faster processor.

Just because it's called a server doesn't mean you need to use it as one.

D

Firewire

[phwiffo]

I think the firewire ports on the front are very suspect. Purely speculation, but perhaps there's R&D going on for some sort of iPod application? I really can't imagine what, as these puppies are networked to the kilt... probably developer incentive as Apple is a force behind the interface.

Re:Problems with XServe hardware.

[gig]

Another company that will use these heavily is Apple themselves:

they did the biggest Webcast ever (Steve Jobs keynote)
they did the biggest download ever (Star Wars trailers)
over 4000 schools do all of their administration on Apple's PowerSchool software, which is hosted on servers at Apple
Apple.com is in the top 5 or 10 most-visited computer Web sites
Apple Store Online is in the top 5 e-tailers
all the computers at each and every Apple retail store have their hard disks wiped and restored to default from a server at Apple every day
Apple has been using Mac OS X Server internally for years and years (it was released in early 1999), and they have a lot of UNIX tradition in there, so their internal network is probably aching for these boxes
Apple's iTools Web services are very popular ... check them out and think about how many servers it takes to give every Mac user a free 20GB virtual disk and full-featured email and online apps such as HomePage
Every Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X installation includes Apple's Software Update, which checks for updates to included software and automatically downloads and installs patches and updates (after getting the user's permission, of course) to keep the clients current

That's a lot of serving, you know? They're going to be able to show this stuff off on their own projects, show what it costs them to serve the biggest Webcast with Xserve and QuickTime Streaming Server and no per-stream fees, or how they keep millions of Mac clients up-to-date, and it's going to be a very compelling solution for any company that also does anything like the above list of things that Apple does with servers.

There are going to be a lot of places where a rack of these will be in a small room somewhere and everybody uses PowerBooks to access the server over Wi-Fi or Gigabit Ethernet.

All Power Macs and PowerBooks have Gigabit Ethernet ... the Xserve is ready to plug and play with all those fast clients that Apple has been shipping out for quite some time now. Why would you get a Dell/Microsoft server with 10/100 when you have lots of 10/100/1000 clients around? Why would you want Windows at all when it costs so much and is so unreliable?

Also keep in mind that all the new stuff announced for Mac OS X "Jaguar" this summer will apply to these Xserves. Apple's Rendevous is ZeroConf networking, for example. And I don't get why so many Slashdot posts seem to think that having FireWire on your 1u server is a bad idea ... FireWire is THE multimedia networking protocol ... Apple is THE multimedia computer company. Macs route real-time audio and video streams and MIDI data through FireWire, so your server has to have it to do that stuff, especially this year as music and video moves over to Mac OS X. There will be a lot of Xserves and their matching RAID boxes in music studios next year.

OS X can't boot off software RAID

[extra88]

This is an important point which often gets glossed over. OS X can take two drives and make them RAID 1 but it can't boot off it. That means even with this Xserve you can't have disk redundancy for your OS. OS's drive fails, server goes kerplunk.

This is what I want - I want my OS on a RAID 1 and my data on a separate RAID 1 or RAID 5. If any drive fails I want the system to keep going, keep providing access to the data and I want it to let me know a drive failed via blinkenlights and by email (my pager has email). If it doesn't have its own email alert, I want it to execute the program of my choice or log it to a file so I can use a script or cron+script to make my own email alert.

I want this in a system which costs around $5000, provides at least 8GB for the OS disk and 30GB for data. I don't need a 14 bay array which will probably cost $3000 before you even add any drives to it. I need to set up an OS X file server this summer. I don't need a blazing processor or even blazing disk performance. I need reliability, redundancy and monitorability (I think I made up that word).

I can get this for Windows 2000 Server from many sources (with hardware RAID and hotswap drives, something I don't really need).

Where to start???

[mallie_mcg]

1) I suppose RC5-64 seeing as that is the one thing i seem to care about at the moment. DAMN, a keyrate of 20.7 M/Keys/sec is faaast. and 48x that in a rack, makes me wish i had much money to blow. DnetcDB

2) Thats a server, woah! They *look* good.Blue PCB inside, sweet metal stylings outside, i know that i should not look at these things and think it is good or anything like that, but i can not help myself.

3) Cooling: This is my only concern, they do not appear to have a decent air intake system at the front of the rack, to cool the internal componantry.Sure the G4 is relatively cool, but there are the HDDs and 48 of them in a stack would be a lot of heat.

4)Comparable to PC offerings. At lest our new racks we are purchasing in the next few weeks are only PIII 1.3G machines, the speed differences of these new apple servers are negligable. To what it used to be

I think that it will be most interesting to see how much penetration into the rack-space market share apple are able to achieve.

Re:..also a RAID server...

[pangloss]

pictured here?

Re:Wet Dream Come True

[Blackstealth]

I'm amazed that Apple didn't release a rack mount system years ago

They almost did, they built a prototype rack mount version of the ANS, called Deep Dish.