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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.)
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Read the article for some great detailed information, but don't bother trying to skip to the bottom to see the conclusions. There really aren't any. The Xserve is more expensive than some servers, and less than others. If you want to compare Xserve with Mac OS X Server to an Intel-based box with Windows 2000 Server, Xserve is a lot cheaper. If you compare it to a box with Linux, Xserve is about the same or a little bit more. Strangely, if you compare it to a Sun, Xserve is a lot more expensive. Which seems wrong, somehow....
...do you really want a 1U rack that advertises color depth and framerate benchmarks instead of requests per second?
...do you want to run a server that can be DOS'd by crashing OpenGL?
And most importantly...
...do you trust your lonely sysadmin alone with a "lickable" server?
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
The big benefit doesn't come from the hardware. The benefit comes from the fact that it's as easy as or easier to administer than a Windows server, and it comes with an unlimited user license. The bulk of the cost of most Windows-based servers is the licensing.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
The problem with comparing OS X with an intel server running windows is that companies buying windows servers are most likely tied to MS for some reason (.NET). I don't see the Xserve competing with a wintel box at all. However, I do see it competing with x86 servers running linux or a BSD variant, since OS X is a BSD variant in itself, porting apps to run on it should be trivial if not already done.
I work in a big windows shop, but we do have a lot of *BSD and linux stuff, and I have already looked into getting some Xserve's for future Unix needs. I have one OS X box now that I use for various things, and it's smokin' fast (only a G3 400). The pricing on the Xserve is maybe a bit better than Dell pricing, and I can get more drive space, perfect for a syslog server or an intrusion detection database.
The article really doesn't draw any conclusions but rather makes some obvious assumptions. I'd like to see some hard benchmarks to see how it compares against a Dell 1650.
One thing I did notice from the article is that the IBM servers have built-in 512MB ram. Why would they build it in? In a large server farm, the one thing that fails most often is memory. If this is built in, it's going to present a big pain in the ass to replace.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
- $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.Operating System: Optional
Unless you are about to install a "free" operating system on your Cow-box, you aren't finished with your pricing comparison...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
Don't buy the RAM from Apple. That tacked on an extra $600 instead of $200.
Plus you're only getting 36GB of HD space, whereas the Apple has 60GB.
Be fair, at least.
Not to mention you get gigabit ethernet, good design (slim casing, swappable drives, etc.) and ease of use. Ease of use is a bigger deal than I think you would be willing to admit. Maintaining a Linux server is going to be harder in just about every way.
The Xserve might not be for you. Fine.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
(I'm speaking here as a SysAdmin, primarily of FreeBSD and Sun boxes, who uses OS X on a TiBook for most things. This is why I wouldn't buy an Xserve for general purpose use.)
No ECC RAM. This is one of the biggest omissions IMHO. As far as I'm concerned, without ECC it's not even in the running.
Only 2GB of RAM. 2G isn't much, these days, particularly if they want to be moving into the Oracle market. I would have expected 4G minimum.
No SCSI option. I'm far from a SCSI bigot, but at the end of the day if boatloads of disk I/O and random-access disk patterns are what you have, SCSI is faster. If all the local disks are going to be used for is booting the machine or perhaps some low-end fileserving, then ATA disks are fine - but it would have been nice to see an option on the high-end machine to swap the ATA drives for SCSI drives. I consider this particularly relevant to Apple's apparently upcoming foray into Oracle territory. I do applaude Apple for making an ATA-based machine that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel everywhere else though (unlike Dell with their PE 350).
No hardware RAID. Again, I consider this a rather large omission as it *seriously* limits the amount of "useful" disk space available. AFAIK OS X doesn't do software RAID5, so you're limited to either a RAID1+0 (with some space subtracted from each drive for the system, since OS X won't be able to boot from a RAID0 - or a RAID5 for that matter, should it be added to Jaguar) or an optimised-for-failure RAID0 (again, losing some space to the system). Even one of those halfway-hardware-RAID chips put on many PC motherboards would have been sufficient, as it at least manages to make all the devices appear as a single drive to the OS, but ideally they would have used one of the existing "real" IDE RAID cards like 3ware make. From where I'm standing, these things top out at around 200 - 220GB of usable space. Other people may be prepared to risk the fourfold increase in risk by using RAID0 over all the drives, but I wouldn't be.
Apart from those things, I think the Xserve is an ok deal, depending on your needs. The places I expect to see them popping up are:
* Data-processing clusters, in which case my RAID requirements above are largely moot (the ECC comment is still very relevant though). They'll be a good deal for this, assuming the required processing benefits greatly from Altivec. If not, a bunch of PowerEdge 1650s are a better deal.
* Low-end fileserving. Eg, to the small group of Mac users we have here, or for a small company. In this case the large amount of storage for the relatively low price is pretty good - although my above comments about the RAID aspect should be taken into account. Additionally, the (undoubtedly simple and excellent) management tools will be a real winner here.
For general purpose use though (eg file & print serving to a range of different machines) I'll stick with my PowerEdge 1650s running FreeBSD. On that note, I'll just point out a few things about the 1650s (my personal favourite 1U machine) that I see a lot of people making these comparisons neglecting:
Price. They start cheaper and mostly stay cheaper.
Processing power. For some things, the 1Ghz G4 is going to be faster. For most things, the 1.4Ghz P3 is going to be faster. For the most things, however, CPU power is largely irrelevant as the tasks are IO bound - in which case the SCSI on the 1650 gives it the edge.
Dual power supplies. Not essential, but nice to have.
Up to 4G RAM and ECC. It might be slower PC133, but even that is going to be faster than swapping. Plus it has ECC - essential for any non-toy server IMHO.
Hardware RAID. Very important - bumps the "usable" amount of disk space up to about 200G (3x73G drives) which puts it in the same ballpark as the Xserve in terms of "usable" storage. Given the 128MB of cache included, also nullifies most of the overhead of RAID5.
Free slots. Even with hardware RAID and dual GB ethernet, the 1650 still has two 64 bit/66Mhz slots free. I'm not quite sure what Apple are thinking with their combo AGP/PCI slot...
Support. The standard support with the 1650 is four hour onsite support. To get that level with the Xserve costs an extra US$950. I'm not sure what Apple's "standard" support is (anyone ?), but bringing the 1650 back to "3 years next business day" knocks nearly US$1800 off the price. Apple are rather coy about exactly what support is included with the Xserve by default - I'd like to see a definite answer as to what you get with just the machine.
I banged together a 1650 that I consider equivalent to Apple's high-end offerings to compare prices:
1650 w/dual 1.4GHz P3, 2GB RAM, 3x73GB 10kRPM drives, RAID controller, 3yrs SILVER support (4hours onsite) : US$7873
Xserve w/dual 1Ghz G4s, 2GB RAM, 4x120GB drives, Applecare premium: US$7799
1650 advantages: much more expandability, much faster drive subsystem, ECC RAM.
Xserve advantages: faster processors if you use something benefiting from Altivec, potentially easier administration.
Personally, I think the 1650 is a better machine for most tasks. But Apple has done fairly well with the Xserve as a first go. I look forward to the second generation which will hopefully address my concerns above.
I think I was bamboozled and run amuck. That was by far one of the stupidest articles I have ever read comparing any technologica ldevice to any other technological device. Even from a platform advocacy standpoint it was pretty fucking stupid. The author looked up prices on the vendors websites and made some dumbfuck guesses about the performance of the systems. BSD is dying trolls can fucking do that. Some points I found especially stupid:
- Rehashing the SCSI/ATA debate. Unless you're going to do a really in depth benchmark of SCSI and ATA drives it is fucking pointless to bring the subject up. Depending on the operating systems, host controller drivers, file system, main memory, DMA constroller, south bridge quality, time of day, and phase of the moon performance between SCSI and ATA drives varies widely. A 7200RPM ATA drive on a badass ATA controller can have better througput than a badass SCSI drive of the same speed. The ATA host controllers give ATA drives capabilities similar to that of SCSI drives if not superior ones at a lower cost per megabyte. A SCSI drive is just a dumb disk with a smart controller.
- Not including the price of software. Unless you're going to be sticking a Free as in beer or speech OS onto one of your x86 systems that don't have the OS pre-loaded you need to include that price. For Windows you're either buying a limited client license or an unlimited client license, that would set even the cheapest of those servers up a couple hundred dollars. The Xserve and Netra come with unlimited user license for the OS (AFAIK with the Netra) with the Xserve using Apache and the Netra having a single processor license for the Sun ONE webserver (iPlanet).
- Saying the G4 is better for multimedia. Fuck, by the multimedia definition used for the G4 you can say the Athlon is geared mainly as a multimedia processor because it has a strong FPU performance. What the fuck is wit hthat backwards logic. Serving up static web pages isn't very processor intensive, often times the overhead for the transaction is beefier than the transaction itself. The efficiency of the web server and if used the dynamic page generation code greatly affects performance. The processor can't be blamed when the OS can't handle the increasing transactions. Case in point were the Netcraft benchmarks showing that that particular kernel version couldn't build and tear down processes fast enough to keep up with IIS' worker thread model. The processor didn't have anything to do with that problem.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't want to get into an argument about every detail. I don't know enough about the Dell machine and whatnot. Those two differences I mentioned with the RAM and HD were both emphasized in the original post, so I pointed that out.
The rest of my points, well, if that isn't worth squat to you, then of course it's good you didn't waste your money.
I think the overall Xserve package is going to be good for some people.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Doesn't a G4 consume less power than a Pentium/Athlon? The picture here shows that it does have fans, but I would assume that maybe that don't have to work as hard as those on an X86 system? So would the running costs be less for the Xserve?
Hate to say it, but this site reeks of blind Mac devotion. I'm not trolling. I'm a Mac user too, but even so, I really hate Mac advocacy sites and would hope that the moderators here on the Slashdot Apple site are savvy enough to weed these out. I could be wrong about this site, but that's my gut instinct after browsing it a little.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
You seem to have over-clocked your calendar. It's been a little over one week, not a couple.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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...
:)
Now if they had a 64bit 66MHz adaptor (since the XServe has two of those), you could maybe see ~400MBps...
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
GPL Deconstructed
Top ten criticisms about the XServe (if I can come up with ten).
1. It doesn't use SCSI!!!
Weren't you the guy I was arguing with in 1995 about how superior SCSI was to IDE, yet you were whining about how expensive SCSI was and how Macs always cost more because of it?
More specifically: Apple announced a FCAL based drive array at the same time. FCAL is MUCH faster than SCSI. Clearly Apple is offering a competitive solution if you need a serious server, and given the prices NetAppliance and EMC charge, I bet they will be extremely price competitive on this front. (As usual)
2. The G4 os SO SLOW!
This is true for people who believe that integer performance is all that matters... but even then, if you do a fair comparison, the G4 gets 2-3 times as much done in a clock cycle. But the reality, these days, is that modern operating systems make extensive use of floating point math, and in this the G4 excels. Hell, the entire UI for Apple will be a 3D rendered surface come the next release, and what isn't off-loaded to the graphics card will be well handled by the G4. The place that integer performance matters a lot is in un-optimized poorly written windowing systems, like Windows and Linux. Those crowds have gone down the path of making poor use of the processor and just buying ever increasing MHz. This puts you further and further behind- as the PowerPC benefits from the same advancements in MHz, the Apple solution gets faster at a much faster rate.
3. I can build a better linux server for half the price!
Ok, but it won't be in 1U will it? 1U is an expensive case to buy (with built in sliding rails , remember.) 3U cases were $700 last I looked. Will it have four IDE controllers? Dual Gigabit Ethernet? Dual processors? 2G of RAM? Seems slashdotters often like to compare high end apple hardware to an off the compUSA shelf desktop PC and claim Apple's overpriced. (That is if they actually do a comparison, usually its just an unsupported claim.)
4. Linux is FREE so there's no value in OS X! comaprisons to windows are Silly, NOBODY uses windows!
Right. Actually, Linux is not free in any real sense. Windows has a high cost when you install it, and then ongoing costs every year. Linux has an equivilent cost when you install it and ongoing costs every year. The difference is with linux you pay the cost in labor. If your labor is worth minimum wage, then Linux is a great deal. If it isn't, the increased cost in installation and ongoing maintenance of the software is pretty high. (Though Windows has lower maintenance labor it does have license costs, so Linux is cheaper ongoing.)
OS X on the other hand is no cost to install (if you took off the full retail price of OS X Server the Apple hardware would be a LOT cheaper in the comparison of prices!) and has a lot lower labor cost to maintain the server. GUI server maintenance is worth the cost-- if you value your time above minimum wage.
Don't get me wrong- I don't dislike Linux. I run it on every machine I have that can't run OS X. I just see these servers for the value that they are... and want to bring a happy, productive, less expensive life to you who have forsaken Apple. You deserve to get more done at lower cost too. (Unlike Windows fans, they deserve the torture they get.)
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Two words: Avie Tevanian. He's the man behind Mach - the microkernel at the heart of OS/X. Mach has had good clustering and distributed computing support from day zero.
Think about it. With relatively little effort, Apple could build a 64-cpu rack-mounted Mac. Any app that uses Mach threads - that is, any multi-threaded, native (Cocoa or Carbon) OS/X app - would be able to take advantage of them.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
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.
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.
I'm not really trying to debate that one is better than the other. I'm just saying that things like the comfortable environment and ease of use is worth something to people. The system may not be the ultimate bargain of all time, shaving off pennies as every opportunity, but it will probably be great for some people.
See above... if you disagree that this is anything, then definitely Apple has little to offer you in the way of servers. Linux can be a pain in the butt to set up and maintain. A Windows server will gut you with user licenses (and other Windows problems).
You're acting like I'm a representative of Apple or the Apple community with what I say... I'm not trying to "sell" their product to you here. I just think if you compare the two products, try to look at the whole picture. I'm not an Apple rep, and neither is the guy in the article.
I could imagine you having a similar reaction to the iPod when it came out, it has a pretty high price tag... and those are selling great. So, maybe Apple will be right on with this too. we'll just see if Xserve turns out to be of value to people like the iPod seems to be.
Apple can do whatever it wants, and if they have no business, they will have to pull the product. That's how it works.
How noble.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
To all those people who think this is an overpriced machine: You're right! Yes, you're right. It is expensive. Will it sell? Yes. Why? Because Apples target markets, Video and audio production companies and schools and colleges who already have large installed bases of macs will buy them.
If you're one the I_can_build_my_pc_at_3am_while_snoring_loudly crowd you would probably always go for an x86 parts anyway. But do you run a company off it? Who do you go to if the server breaks down? Do you have a guarantee? Do you have easy managment tools? Can you configure Appletalk on the server side?
I have no doubt that this machine fits in somewhere in the middle of the pack for stats alone and that you can get cheaper and more expensive x86 machines, with SCSI etc etc. But it will still sell. I can't prove it to you, but I vote we take a look in six months when it the RAID option have been out for a few months.
Ok, how much will it cost to get 36 gigs of SCSI with the Xserve?
From Apple $200 more for the Ultra 150 SCSI card - you can probably get it cheaper elsewhere. The drives don't appear to be available from apple but you can always buy the drives from someone else.
Gigabit ethernet is quite useless, even for a company using 10 Mbit of traffic, which is a HUGE amount...Like I said, for the price of Apple's lowend machine I could almost buy another gateway, just to serve our images.
Taking these two statements together I assume those images your are serving aren't the typically huge number of 10-30MB images that an imagesetting or design firm would be serving with this machine (8.5x11 cymk @ 300dpi = 32.2MB without alpha channels and a half dozen photoshop layers - and double that of course for a two-page spread - not THAT much maybe but it adds up when a dozen designers and art directors are slinging the stuff around the network - I can only imagine the files sizes that video guys are used to - I doubt Gigabit is really sufficient. 10 Mbits of traffic is not "HUGE" it's pitifully tiny and Gigabit ethernet is REALLY useful when all your clients have gigabit ethernet (as macs do) and you are moving a lot of big files back and forth.
There are *other* uses for servers beyond web serving and those other uses have somewhat different requirements. Apple is NOT really targetting web serving with this machine, The Xserve is targetted at intranet, file and print serving in mixed platform environments at design/video shops, schools and biotech. It also has a secondary target as a video production workstation (thus the firewire jack on the FRONT of the "server")
I know I'd probably take this gateway box over the Apple (certainly if it were Dell), but there are some issues. The 72 gig of disk is nice, but you only have 2 disks, so you're limited to RAIDO, RAID1 or RAIDO1 if that's important to you (and if it ain't, you should ditch the RAID controller). It also only has one Gigabit ethernet port while Apple has two; maybe not very important in some set-ups, but I've been shopping around for stuff recently and had the annoyance of not finding out how hard it can be to get that second gigE in the configuration. Lack of ECC memory might be a deal-breaker for the Apple as you note. Frankly, the *big* interesting features of the XServe only become visible when you move off the bottom of the line-up. Most of the low-end PIII servers out there will top out at less than 300 gig of disk, and to get there costs a *ton* more money. For the same cash outlay for an XServe, you can get your 480 gig of disk, and have money left to buy more (non-Apple) RAM and your tape-back up. There are people out there (me) who would love to have much more disk for huge files (I'm datasets, not databases) in non-commercial situations and already have a Mac or two around; that's the real target market I believe.
Babar
Here, Apple's server management. Works great, especially with dozens or hundreds of them, all monitored from one window.
I wish I could provide more information, but the page where you could find out this information (put up by the gun grabbers themselves) is no longer up at:
http://www.progressivefunds.com/hci/
Nevertheless, while it WAS up, Crucial was one of several companies (along with Dell, McAfee, The Sharper Image, OfficeMax, and even Reader's Digest!) who you could signup with to donate part of your puchase to Handgun Control Inc.
Since I treat the Second Amendment with no less reverance than the first, I will never buy any products from any of these companies ever again.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/