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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
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
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
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.
Also, note that the Dell 1650 that performed so poorly had lots of expensive options
2x 1.4 Ghz Pentium III
1 GB Ram
Windows 2000 Server
3x36 GB Internal Raid (SCSI)
Dell Perc 3/Di Disc Controller
4638 dollars... (with no fancy options selected such as monitoring, rack rails, etc. No operating system: add 799 if you really want Windows 2000).
The XServe was configured with
2x 1GHz PowerPC G4
1 GB Ram
480 GB RAID (ATA drives, though)
Total: 6049 dollars
I'm not going to play the "you get so much more with the apple" game, though. If you reduce the drive complement to 3x60GB drives, though. (I'm assuming that the 480 GB complement was overkill, and did not affect the benchmark score)
Total: 5099.
Without an OS, the Dell Machine still beats the XServe (in price) while barely losing in performance. Add Windows 2000, and the Dell becomes more expensive ($5437). Add sufficient client licenses to fully replicate the benchmark situation, and the price climbs ever higher.
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...
Actually, when it comes to 1U servers, it is. Go check Dell's website. The Poweredge 1650 is Dell's fastest 1U machine and it offers 1 or 2 1.4GHz Pentium IIIs. PIIIs are still commonly used in servers, because the P4 is a power hog and doesn't actually give you a speed boost. Remember that the PIII is actually about 50% faster than the P4 at the same clock speed. Intel's server optimized processor is the Xeon, and that is just a Pentium III with boatloads of cache. You can't find them in 1U servers, either.
What exactly do you expect Xinet to use for benchmarking? They need to have an answer when people ask "what hardware runs your software best?" Read the article, it does not go around drooling over the XServe. It says how big of a shop each server is good for. It specifically says that the XServe is a good choice for small to medium size graphic shops. Nothing more. It is of significantly more interest how much the 2x1GHz XServe outperforms the 2x1GHz Powermac G4. To quote from Xinet's site:
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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."
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