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Xserve Outperforms Sun, SGI, Windows
Pahroza writes "Xinet has released their 2002 benchmark configurations, with tests including output generation and AppleShare file serving. Xserve was only bested by machines sporting at least twice as many CPUs as the two it was using. MacCentral is also running a story on the results, and you can download a PDF of the benchmarked configurations."
Xinet writes software for the publishing industry, magazines, newspapers, advertising. This includes AppleShare servers for the Macs in these shops. Thier AppleShare software was written for Solaris and SGI machines and was quite mature before the Xserve even came out.
Apple may have targeted their design to this kind of thing since these are shops that would most likely be open to trying their servers. I don't know. If they did it sounds like a pretty good plan to me.
I'm actually pretty impressed. The SGI 300 box is pretty sweet and incudes Ultra3 SCSI Drives. I wonder how much cheaper the Xserve really is once you've got the ATA Raid setup on it like the benchmarked machine had for the tests.
No, they used Photoshop to open and save large images from/to a network server. Can't you read?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Let me start by saying that I'm an apple fan, I own two recent macintoshes (a g3/400mhz pismo laptop and a g4/550mhz desktop). I like apple, i like osx... I'm crazy in this way... that being said...
... i mean the executives look and say "gee this machines is only using two 1ghz processors, and its almost as fast as this one using 2 2.4ghz processors". I mean as far as a breakdown by mzh apple did great almost twice as many requests per mhz. however when the price/performance breakdown was computed apple came out with a price problem, it cost almost twice as much...
I've been itching to get my hands on one of these to test with, but since Apple couldn't get me one I went ahead and had them send over a dual 1ghz g4 tower to test nBLAST with. My feeling being since most of nBLAST does is cpu dependent the distinction is minor.
I went ahead and set up a number of machines, but I'm only going to talk about two.
a 1u dual 2.4ghz intel box with 1.5gigs of ram (custom)
a dual 1ghz g4 tower with 1.5gigs of ram
I created a number of standard BLAST queries and ran them against both machines multiple times and compared the results. To summarize the dual 2.4 edged out the mac for queries going to nBLAST (which apple optimized) and trounced the mac for other queries (non-optimized). This is still impressive
apple, when will you learn, you might be able to charge more for those fancy cases on the desktop, especially during a boom, but during a bust, noone cares what their rackmounts look like.
_
b
The one PC platform box was a dual PIII 1.4Ghz. Not exactly the performance leader in dual CPU PC servers.
Actually, for 1U boxes, it is. See IBM for example. Their top speed is 1.2mhz PIII. Fast Pentium IVs aren't out for servers, unless you count Xenons, and those things need a good 4U if you don't want to toast your rack.
From maccentral:
This wasn't a test of all-around server tastiness, but of the area Xinet is most interested in- publishing. That means pulling files down local with Photoshop, collecting for a print job (whether QuarkXPress or InDesign), opening the darn EPS file straight from The Server because the Boss doesn't want you saving it on the local drive, and so on. It's the client that needs the AltiVec optimisation; the server just needs to "shovel" the files here and there.
Xinet needs to know where its software will be best used, so that they can plan accordingly. Other 'benchmarks' aren't interesting to them.
Y'see, until now, WinNT box sellers were trying to muscle into the publishing server market, extolling their rack-mountability and cross-platform compatability, and Linux box manufacturers weren't that far behind. You could say that Apple's xServe is going to win back those shops first, then go for the mixed-OS networks, securing the flanks before launching the main offensive into Serverland...
Who cares about file sharing & serving? And batch print jobs?
perhaps a company that develops prepress network software? sorta like the company that produced the benchmarks in question.
Here's a similarly configured Penguin Computing Linux server.
In case that quote link dies:
Standard Features
Selected Features
Price: $2,124
Compared to the "Fastest" Xserve configuration ($3999 with default options), it's only got a 40GB drive, a single Gigabit Ethernet interface (with two integrated 10/100 nics), and no FireWire. Neither system has a support plan other than the free warranty coverage.
Not "sub-$1000", but not too bad.
Of course, the Penguin system runs Red Hat Linux 7.3, which isn't so hard to use, but it's certainly not "point at the picture and click" like the Xserve appears to be.
There's obviously not as much room for expansion with the Penguin system. (Drive bays, Gigabit card uses the only PCI slot, etc.)
I don't really have an opinion about this; just wanted to provide an example of a "Dual AMD 1U Server with identical[ish] specs."