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."

Comments

No shit

[Starship Trooper]

Apple servers work faster for AppleShare? Say it ain't so!

Show me some less biased benchmarks, please.

Re:No shit

[dbrutus]

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.

Re:No shit

[garren_bagley]

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.

Re:Photoshop Opens

[Lars T.]

No, they used Photoshop to open and save large images from/to a network server. Can't you read?

Re:Apple really isn't hugely overpriced anymore...

[BitGeek]

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.

Re:This is a horrible horrible benchmark!

[DavidRavenMoon]

The XServe is a server - and 50% of this benchmark test is rating how fast it opens up files in Photoshop? WHO CARES! Its a server, tell me how much faster it is at routing mail, serving files through apache, backing up data, etc. benchmark it doing things that a server does! This benchmark is useless IMHO.

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.

You guys have no idea what you are criticizing..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Of course it seems unfair!

[Saint Fnordius]

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...

Re:thoughts

[dhovis]

3. The one PC platform box was a dual PIII 1.4Ghz. Not exactly the performance leader in dual CPU PC servers.

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.

4. The benchmarks were all runnning one server app, Xinet's own fullpress.

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:

Why Publish These Tests?

Xinet believes it is important to publish current, accurate, detailed information concerning the performance of our software on the server platforms we support.

By publishing this data, Xinet hopes to assist customers in choosing the systems that are appropriate for their needs, and to ensure smooth integration of Xinet products into their workflows. Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations are the result of extensive testing in the dedicated Xinet lab. Xinet hopes customers will use this data as a guide to the performance they can expect from various server-based workflows.