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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."
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.
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.
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
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...