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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Regarding the color depth and framerate benchmarks, there are going to be a ton of video professionals usng the Xserve as a workstation in addition to the folks using it as a more traditional server.
I'm glad that Apple provides the video card options that they do on this bos.
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.
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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")