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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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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")