Xserve Outside the Reality Distortion Field

Gentoo69 writes "OSNews has a comparison of the Xserve with other 1U servers. How does the Apple offering stands up against the competition?" (Hint: pretty well.)

Comments

Re:The conclusion: inconclusive

[frankske]

Well, his final conclusions are what they are:

Apple's first serious foray into the server world definitely have some controversial design decisions. The impact of these will be determined once these units get into the field. From a price standpoint, the Xserve shows up reasonably close to its Intel brethren, and in many cases surpasses the cost effectiveness of the Intel machines. From a performance standpoint, the Xserve should certainly be able to holds its own in many cases, and if Apple's statements are verified, it even will surpass the performance of these Intel based servers on all the major tests. The Xserve can easily be a contender in the low end, low profile server market.

About your comments about the Suns: look at the specs. They are cheap ... for a sun, but what's always been true about Sun remains true: Don't buy low end Suns!

Compaq prices

[questionlp]

I think that the prices for the Compaq servers are way out of line compared to what someone can buy one through a reseller (like CDW or Insight). I'm guessing that the author of the article just went to Compaq's online store and configured the servers to get the outrageous prices. I think almost everyone knows that Compaq screws people with the prices listed on their site. Below are just some of the overpriced items:

• $3300 for a second P3-S 1.4Ghz processor
• +$7833 to upgrade from 256MB of RAM to 2GB of RAM (obviously inflated)
• +$2500 for a 73GB hard drive

I have ordered a quad P3 Xeon (700Mhz with 1MB cache), 1GB of RAM, 4x 36GB 10K SCSI hard drives, Compaq 4x00 RAID controller for just over $20k and that was over a year ago. The only pieces that we purchased that were not Compaq branded were the memory modules (go Crucial!). Sure... there is a difference between a 7U server and a 1U server, but smart shoppers will not get dry humped by purchasing Compaq servers and options directly from Compaq.

Re:Compaq prices

[pi radians]

The same goes for Apple's site. You'll be better off getting the lowest amount of RAM and HDD and then adding them yourself. Companies like Apple and Compaq sign contracts with hardware companies that will always have inflated prices.

Re:gigabit ethernet cpu load

[richard-parker]

Well, considering that the PCI bus you're hooking up the GB adaptor to has a 264MBps max throughput (32bit 66MHz on the Mac), factoring in overhead and such, it's not surprising that GigaE runs at 200MBps...

I think you are confusing bytes/second and bits/second. A 32-bit 66MHz PCI bus has a data rate of 266 Megabytes/second, which is more than twice the data rate of Gigabit Ethernet.

Then factor the fact that there are 2 CPUs and two GigaE boards means if they share one PCI bus, then the bottleneck is neither the CPU nor the cards... here's to hoping that each board sits on a separate PCI bus :)

In the Xserve the primary Gigabit Ethernet port is on the logic board and controlled directly by Apple's custom memory controller/north bridge ASIC. It doesn't occupy any expansion slots and doesn't consume any PCI bus bandwidth.

The other Gigabit Ethernet port is on a PCI card that is installed, in the standard configuration, in the Xserve's combination PCI/AGP 4X half-length slot. This bus should have adequate bandwidth for Gigabit Ethernet as no other slots are connected to this bus.

The other two full-length slots are on a different bus. They are served by a single 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus with a data rate of 533 Megabytes/second. In the standard configuration one of these slots is filled by a VGA graphics card. The four ATA/100 busses are connected to this PCI bus, so intensive disk I/O could interfere with the performance of cards in these two slots.

Re:You can't cause a DOS by crashing OpenGL

[inkfox]

The Quartz & Aqua GUI are no more an essential part of the OS than, say, X11 & KDE are. If the GUI freezes up, ssh into the box & restart it. GUI != a bad server OS.

It was meant to be funny, despite the 101 interpretations it's gotten.

Seriously, I'm quite impressed. Given the relative licensing costs alone, I'd encourage any datacenter to give the new Xserve units a serious look.

The times, they may be a changin' for the better! :)