Slashdot Mirror
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."
Since the XServe is aimed, first of all, for those Macintosh islands of creatives in corporate america as well as apple using scientific firms like genentech, Appleshare connections are very relevant indeed. I would expect that when Apple updates its UFS support to the modern spec and it gets a lot of other small details nailed cold, they'll branch out in their marketing but they're shooting for a specific target market right now and the benchmarks are relevant for that market.
I expect that when Samba 3 integrates perfectly with Active Directory, Apple is going to go after the workgroup file and print market that finds Linux too technically challenging and is sticking for the higher priced Windows solutions for that reason alone. At that point they'll have a track record and IS organizations won't be so nervous about the Apple label anymore.
1. They used an old dual-750Mhz Fire 280R when Sun doesn't even have base configs for 280Rs with that CPU anymore. How bout using up-to-date machines?
2. Strangely, they chose to use third-party Gig-E cards rather than Sun's own, quite good Gig-E hardware. This alone could be enough to ruin the validity of the benchmarks. This is probably because they chose to focus on Gig-E over copper, a strange choice in and of itself.
3. The one PC platform box was a dual PIII 1.4Ghz. Not exactly the performance leader in dual CPU PC servers.
4. The benchmarks were all runnning one server app, Xinet's own fullpress.
All these benchmarks show, is that one app, from one developer ran faster on the Apple Xserve than on some selected, out-of-date, hardware from other vendors. To all appearances, Xinit was not doing a platform cometition so much as a random benchmark with hardware that they happened to have one hand. The number of variables that could invalidate the results entirely is just silly.
Excellent comment and summary. Some people don't seem to get it. Apple has clearly stated what their market is and they've set the benchmarks up in this case for that market.
Original comment about bias is totally off target. Look at the specs for the tests, look at what the parameters are, then criticize the results if there's something phony going on as alledged.
Thanks for thinking before leaping like the original poster in this thread.
Dual AMD 1U Servers with identical specs to Apple's Xserve can be had sub-$1000 Xserve costs $5000.
This was claimed many times when the Xserve was announced, but interestingly, nobody was able to give a pointer to one.
Apparently these mythical cheap servers don't exist.
Since its rare for a server to have four drive bays, etc, and a new style 1U enclosure was created by Apple, I'm pretty confident htat you are simply telling a lie here.
If you weren't you'd have provided an example.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
A FILE server, serves files. XServe is not a web server, or a mail server, but it can do those things. As I said before, in a lot of very large print companies, all live jobs are on a central file server. So you log in and open these files off the server. They might be huge 900 MB TIFF files, or a QuarkXPress file with many EPS and TIFF files in it. This is real world, day-to-day work for people like my self.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Servers, as you unfortunately think, are not just designed for one thing in particular. Some are FILE servers, some are APPLICATION servers, some are RENDERING servers, some are PRINT servers, some are WEB SERVERS, some are ATM, some are MAINFRAME, some are...Kid, get a clue. The job one server does at serving files with massive I/O both internally and externally, is NOT the same as some server being used at a backend rendering machine (which isn't used as much as Slashdot people pretend that they are...in the real world that is).