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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.
OMG
Apple sleek hardware + 1U Rack Mount Server + Kick Ass Unix with the sweetest GUI on the market + Gigabit Ethernet + Unlimited Client License included
*Faints*
I feel like a 12-year-old girl at a Backstreet Boys concert.
*Screams*
The original specs are wrong, it's $2999 for the SINGLE 1 GHz G4, $3999 for the dual. Not as sweet a deal, but still not too bad.
Unless I misunderstood, the XServe has two 64bit PCI slots, and only one is used (by an ethernet card). The other ethernet port is onboard. This leaves one slot free, or two if you don't need to ethernet ports.
What, am I the only one who wants to have a rack of these and a kvm switch built into his desk?
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
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. "
the $1000 price increase also includes a 2nd 1gHz G4. they failed to mention that the first one is single proc.
A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head
1000$ for an extra 256megs of Apple blessed DDR
Apple's RAM is always overpriced, just like most OEMs. So you buy extra RAM 3rd party, as usual.
IDE just as fast as SCSI my ass
True, but Ultra3 is an obvious expansion option.
No expansion slots. The second gigabit network card takes up the only PCI slot
I'm not sure where you got that idea. The press release says: "three PCI slots, two of which are 64-bit, 66 MHz". I have no clue how they fit 3 PCIs and 4 bays into a 1U box, but I sure am glad.
- If you want a pure Unix experience at the command line, install OS X on UFS. Trivial. Works. Breaks some third party apps that are Carbon based, but you'll likely not care (I don't).
- porting: Most packages compile out of the bag or with very little in the way of patching (a lot only require a couple of command line arguments. Fink.sourceforge.net currently has 1100 packages 'ported' to OS X, all fully managed by the debian package manager.
Fink has certainly grown in size since your purchase, but not much else has changed.
As James Gosling recently said: "OS X is like Linux, only with Q/A [Quality Assurance] and taste!".
Well the dell *looked* good, but lets see:
Windows 2000 Advanced Server with 25 Client Licenses [add $3295]
VersaRails for Non-Dell 4-Post Rack [add $129]
Dell Remote Assistant Card Version 3 without Modem [add $499]
73GB 10K RPM Ultra 160 SCSI Hard Drive [add $550]
Intel Pro 1000XT Gigabit NIC-Copper [add $189]
Total cost - $6,459.00
But maybe you wanted Linux - $3,323.00
I won't really get into the who SCSI/IDE debate, suffice to say Apple announced a Fibre Raid with 400MB through put, it you really want it. Shipping in Q4 with 1.48 TB of space in a 3U, all hot swappable. The Apple prices are spot on for all the features they bring. IMHO of course.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
Nice rack.
*dodges hurled items*
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.
It comes with Blinkenlights for the two processor, just like the good old BeBox
That alone is worth $4k
P.S.:These machines actually cluster. Now imagine a rack full of clustered 1U G4s, all with psychedelic Blinkenlights showing activity.
OSX supports software RAID, even at the consumer level. Put in 2 or more disks, and you can stripe/mirror all you want. The new servers have 4 independent IDE channels...it's a safe bet that you'll be able to set up a RAID. Maybe not RAID 5, but that's what you buy the forthcoming fiber channel storage device for. In any case, how is built-in RAID a rip-off?
its in the management graphic. i want that too
I want 2D games back.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Apple's small server
just 1U so powerful
I think I have wood
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
Increasingly Audio/Video production is becoming de-centrelized to the point where editors and producers need to be able to work from a common source that addresses "thier" needs. Not the needs of gamers or SOHO admins.
Since the production work is mostly done on Macs it makes perfect sense to use a Mac server.
Cost of hardware has always been secondary to quality of workflow and consistency in delivering the end product. (meaning: the shit should just work! and it should work the way you'd expect)
Face it, we pay THOUSANDS for audio cards and video equipment. We are not home "tinkerers" and dont want to tinker with our servers.
If these Xservers can also double as workstations 2 birds go down with one stone.
Windows admins and Linux hobbiests will never get it.
Go Apple !
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
As a ballpark figure, 1 watt turned on all year costs you $1. Maybe double that if you are in a continuously air conditioned environment like a machine room.
The savings may not be too large. I checked an Athlon system with an ammeter recently. It came in at 120W with one drive in it while doing its server tasks. So, they at least are in the same ballpark. (The measurement techniques are surely different, I would not claim one was higher than the other based on this data. Just that they are near each other.)
Power is one of the reasons I suggest people not use that crappy old 486 or pentium as a NAT/firewall box in their house unless they are doing it for joy. In about a year or so of electricity savings you can pay for one of the new integrated appliances and enjoy increased reliablity and savings in the following years.
*sigh* You are talking about kernel preemption, or preempting the system task, not preemptive multitasking.
In many places in both the Linux (2.4/2.5) and Darwin kernel's (depending on the device drivers), both will fail to preempt themselves for a userland task. (Yes, Virginia, there are chunks of code even Darwin won't preempt) Likewise, in many places (even in extremely old versions of the linux kernel), preemption can happen. You would be correct to say that there is a focus in 2.5 for trying to eliminate or optimize a lot of the non-preemptable code and to say that Darwin experiences marginally lower average latency than Linux 2.4, but to use that as some way to measure system performance is as ridiculous as it is stupid.
Besides, if you want to get super technical, there are two robust and stable implementations of Posix realtime threads for linux (RTAI and RTLinux) that have existed for a number of years. Darwin has no such beast. Now we are talking latencies of 10-15 microseconds vs the low-millisecond ranges of either Darwin or Linux 2.4/2.5
And if you want to get even further into the technical mumbo-jumbo, the ARM processor can rock both the PPC and the X86 in terms of preemption. There are event's called FIQ's (Fast IRQ) on ARM that cause the processor itself to preempt ITSELF and execute some other code! You can call efficient FIQ code on the order of 10MHz and still run your normal stuff on top of the CPU -- and on Linux too -- on top of RTAI Posix RT threads -- or not!
Oh, and Intel makes the best ARM cores, too. Yeah and they have 32 bit registers just like your 64/128bit PPC's.
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...
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.
That I can see, I guess...
But you returned it (eating the 10% fee) before taking the 30 seconds it would have taken you to find out that the traditional *nix filesystem was an available option?
That's just stupid.
For the record, if you don't like HFS+, you can use UFS. Also if you don't like tcsh, you can install bash (free download from Stallman & co.). If you took a deep breath, calmed down, and did a quick visit to any of thousands of web sites that were chattering about this stuff at the time, you could have found all this out. For that matter, if you had bothered to look into it before buying a $1200 laptop, you would have known all this going in.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
Have I installed secure Apache? No, it comes installed. have I set one up? Yes and takes 1 minute to configure a website and 3 minutes to configure a secure one. Right out of the box - that's why it's easier.
Have I installed Tomcat? No, it comes installed - well and older version does. Played with it - not interested. Will install newer version if/when I want to.
Postgres? No, but I played with pre-installed MySQL - 2 minutes to turn on and use. Upgraded to later version (to fix BLOB>255 bug) and continued to run it. That did take more than 5 minutes. Maybe 15? You can downlaod source and install or get binary images and install them if you want the latest version.
I can get an application server up and running for much less than a WebObjects/Oracle solution.
Yes you can. I NEVER said you couldn't. Not everyone is you. Some people want that solution and here's a product that supplies it.
On Mac but preferably on Linux/Intel for hardware cost reasons - hell I provide SCSI RAID
Again, not everyone is you. This is exactly my point: Apple offers a product. People seem offended by it's very existence. When was the last time you heard someone say, "Why does BMW even make or sell cars?" Because people buy them.
I can do cheaper/differently/blah blah blah And now that Apple offers this product you still can. Here's an idea: If you don't want it - don't buy it.
=tkk
PS XServe will do RAID - software RAID as is or add SCSI/RAID with a PCI card. From the Apple BTO store. Go check it out.
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Another company that will use these heavily is Apple themselves:
... 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
... 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?
... 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.
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
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
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
> 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.