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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."
Show me some less biased benchmarks, please.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Will corporations really take Apple seriously as a contender in the server market? This market has traditionally been dominated by Sun, among others. It seems by these performance graphs that Apple is really at the same level as the other major contenders as far as speed. Given that it has fewer CPU's, it is probably cheaper than some of the better-performing ones tested.
Will companies really start using Apple's Xserve to replace Sun or other servers?
Perhaps you should look at the specs of the other machines that did beat the Xserve, they all had four or more processors. Xserve outperformed all other machines with two proc's...
You must have been looking at the PowerMac benchmark. This title was about the Xserve.
Courtesy of Apple... coming in second to dead last, with lots of machines beating your ass is not "outperform". Talk about "THINK DIFFERENT"
Considering those machines "beating Apple's ass" are
machines with double the processors or more, how is
this thinking different? Or were you just trolling?
Methinks the latter...
Still, Starship Trooper's got a point. Most of the
tasks the Xserve was put through are things Macs
have traditionally done well. I'd like to see how
they handle when faced with other hardcore server
duties such as heavy duty rendering and the like.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
The Machines that beat the Xserve at Output generation were a Sun Fire 4800 with 12 CPUs, a Sun Fire 880 w/ 4 CPUs, an 8 CPU SGI 3200 and an SGI 300 w/4 CPUs. Does anyone know what the cheapest one of the above goes for? You can get the base Dual 1 Ghz Xserve for $3999. Do the others come close in price? Unfortunately I don't want to have to have an SGI sales rep contact me to just find out what the price is.
So the benchmark only tested them on Photoshop, which is a AltVec optimized applicaiton from the beginning? That and where is the rest of the benchmark data? Doesn't seem to be a real fair comparison.
Ended up buying the wife a couple Mac's to do here art on and such. Never got her to use the Linux box, or her Windows box much. Got her that Mac and she is on it all the time, working in Photoshop and using her tablet and stuff (guess they are more intiative for artists, course I am lost on the thing sometimes, end up using the command prompt a lot ;). The thing that struck me was the price was about the cost of a lowend PC from say Dell or something. So assuming their servers are prices likewise there shouldn't be a steep price curve anymore.
HELLO, sombody home? The Apple that ended up "second to dead last" wasn't even a "real" server.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You are describing a very narrow view of what a "server" is.
This benchmark is meant to simulate a file server which is holding files used by a workgroup of graphic artists using Photoshop, and submitting print jobs.
A workgroup of graphic artists does not need to run Apache or route e-mail. They need to open and save large files, shared among multiple users, and submit large print jobs.
I will agree that this view is equally narrow, but different people have different computing needs.
Dual AMD 1U Servers with identical specs to Apple's Xserve can be had sub-$1000 Xserve costs $5000. Compare the performance of FIVE AMD machines to the Xserve.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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
If you are talking "beige box" pricewatch machine, then sorry but that isn't comparing apples to apples (no pun intended). They are benching major manufactuers file servers. While a "beige box" is great for a mom and pop or small shop, most corporatations aren't quite ready to run them for production file servers. Yes that is stupid, yes I don't agree with it, cause they are just as good. But this article is comparing MAJOR brands.
I hate reading that such-and-such has released statistics showing that xyz is faster than abc, when I know next to nothing about such-and-such.
..."
m . etails.html):
/selling to one of their key markets...)
So wondering what I could find out quickly:
According to their homepage:
"...Xinet is the leading developer of prepress networking software.
(http://www.xinet.com/)
and if you go looking for it - '2002 testing details' (deeplink: http://www.xinet.com/benchmarks/benchmarks.2002/b
"...Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations measure network throughput by Macintosh clients opening and saving Photoshop files stored on the server..."
Given who they are (a company who makes software for an Industry Apple has a significant presence in) and how they test (using Macintosh clients) how they obtained their benchmark results (and why photoshop gets in to them) is a little easier to understand.
(I have to wonder if this is why Apple Keynotes have photoshop demos to show off their hardware - they're focusing on
- Sun Fire 280r w/4 CPUs approx $18k
- Sun Fire 880 w/4 CPUs approx $60k
- Sun Fire 4800 w/12 CPUs approx $375k
- Dell 1650 w/2 procs approx $6.6k
- Apple Xserve w/2 procs approx $6k
SGI is to cool to list their prices online, apparently.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.
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
From maccentral:
Right. I did say it can do those things too :)
The benchmark test was as a file server however
-- 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
We use xinet software on SGIs and Solaris machines long before they ported full-press to OS X. We have an Irix box that is 4 years old running xinet. For a long time, to get better Appleshare than Apple was to run on a unix machine running Full-Press.
So this is not a matter of Xinet writing software optimized on OS X. That is not true. Full-Press does not rely on the built in OS's capabilities for AFP but its own. OSXs version is about less than 2 years old. In fact, I believe most of FullPress implementations run on SGI.
The benchmarks are quite impressive because you are dealing heavy I/O (pushing 600 megs and 1 gig files) are normal in this business.
Which benchmark were you looking it?? Check the main article above. Where the text is blue or maybe green and underlined, click with your mouse's left button. You should soon be faced with the benchmark results that are being discussed here.
You've clearly come upon something else entirely...?
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
If you worked in my production department and opened an 900 MB TIFF file from OFF THE APPLESHARE FILE SERVER I'd probably fire you.
Macs come with 60 gig ATA hard disks now. How dumb can you be not to copy the file to local storage before editing it? Real publishing houses also use OPI servers to generate lo-res placement files (FPOs) so they can edit the pages at screen dpi (72-96) and have the changes reflected on the RIP at press dpi (1016-4800 dpi) with the burden placed on the OPI server to merge in the hires (not your mac). Distiller also works well to reduce ridiculously huge graphics to a managable PDF file without much visible loss in quality (with the right Distiller settings). Most apps will let you place a PDF in a document and do operations on it, just like an EPS. 1 MB per color layer at 1200 for a newspaper page (13x22") seems to be about average at the two newspapers I worked at. Much easier to work with. You might find your work goes a little quicker.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
people, I just feal the need to point out one thing,
IT'S A GOD DAMMED MOTHER FUCKING BENTCHMARK!!!!!!
That means its like politics, unless its something good for the side your on it doesn't mean anything.
as far as I can tell this bentchmark says that a Mac is good at Photoshop.
what a shock. get over it. move on.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
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...
You call these benchmarks? Who cares about file sharing & serving? And batch print jobs? Why can't these guys get on the planet & use the industry standard?!
Quake 3 frame rates!
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
Some companies, like Bowne (largest financial printer in the world) don't allow you to copy ANY files onto your local hard drive. I have a friend that works there, and all files are handled from a server. Yes, they use OPI, but if you have to edit the image, you obviously have to work with the real file. Other friends I know work in similar situations. The Macs have software installed to prevent any files from being copied, even to the desktop!
PDF files are a hit-or-miss proposition. If the operator knows what they are doing, then they usually work fine... but spot colors and even bleeds can be problematic when the PDF file is made incorrectly.
I agree that it's stupid to have to work with big files off a server, but some shops make you do that. I run the Mac dept where I work so we don't do such things!
-- 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).
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."
Servers, as you unfortunately think, are not just designed for one thing in particular.
Never said they were. Apparently however, you
attributed that to me anyway. I'm quite aware of
what servers do. Did you read the article at all?
It focused on only a two things, file serving and
output generation/print serving, nowhere did it
mention web serving, ATM, appserving or rendering.
If you re-read my post, I used rendering as an
example. So your point about other purposes is
essentially saying the same thing I was.
...So you're getting your PhD in trolling?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Apple is notably absent from SPEC's list--they never submitted results.
However, third parties have run the SPEC benchmarks. A 1GHz G4 seems to perform about as well as a 1GHz Pentium III: decent but not overwhelming. See also this Register article.
Apple should move to the G5 quickly. Or, perhaps, Apple should even switch to some 64bit Intel or AMD processor--Motorola is likely going to keep remaining behind the curve a bit.
Includes some benchmark results:
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Good
No, you missed my point, which is that SleepyGuy was using a dual-G4 desktop measurement to predict the performance of an Xserve, which has a different memory architecture.
Sure, it might not make much of a difference, but I'm not going to take his "feeling" as proof. I'd rather see hard data.
WebBench runs 60% faster on an Xserve than on a comparable IBM eServer running Linux. BLAST runs up to 19 times faster than on a comparable Sun Fire. Disk I/O is 50% faster than on a comparable Dell PowerEdge.
I know it is kewl to doubt everything on /. but perhaps you can show
benchmarks that dispute these numbers?
Lies about crimes
Yeah I was joking.
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
It seems to me that if Apple spreads the word about how well their Xserve performs, possibly doing more benchmark tests, they could take control of the small server market. Heck, they might even branch out to larger servers. Its Apple, anything could happen.