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

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. "

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.