Xserve Competes With High-End Unix Servers

wayneh writes "There is a great article at ITworld.com about how Apple's Xserve is finding its way to high-end server vendors. The vendors who traditionally sold Sun and IBM servers are now looking into and stocking the Xserve as their clients become curious about the system. It'll be interesting to see how well the Xserve does among its more traditional competitors."

Comments

Big surprise

[MalleusEBHC]

I'm a diehard Mac guy, but I'll be the first to admit that Apple has not put out competitive servers before the XServe. When Apple changed from offering basically souped up Powermacs with a non *nix OS to one of the best 1U servers on the market running OS X, does it really surprise anyone that they are going to be getting attention in markets of which they traditionally were not even on the radar?

Re:Big surprise

[dbrutus]

Congratulations, you're not the target market. AFAIK, Apple's trying to compete with Dell, IBM, HP, etc. not with Joe Blow white box vendor down the street. I believe that most of the hardware price difference goes away if you compare only national brands and in a few configurations, the X-Serve is cheaper.

I always thought that the largest segment of users would be Windows refugees who use it for file and print services in unlimited license mode. For that scenario (and there are lots of people who need this), the XServe is *much* cheaper while the administrative ease means you don't need to radically upgrade your IT department skills.

Re:High-End?

[sedna]

The whole idea with the article is that high-end *vendors* are starting to sell Apple, not that Xserve is a high-end server. Both IBM and Sun have entry-level servers in the segment where Apple are aiming. With this trend, costumers will find Apple products as an alternative in the channels they usually use to buy Sun or IBM low-end servers.

Re:High-End?

[sedna]

You are right in principle, I suppose the correct term would be "Vendors of high-end systems". I am a phd Student at a meteorology department. Our computer park start with Sun workstations and end with Linux clusters and a couple of mid-range Sun servers. Even if we normally buy systems with the same or a little bit higher specs than Dell stuff, we do it from vendors that also sell huge server parks. The fact that these companies start to sell Xserve have, of course, no implication on their sales of Sun Fire 15k systems, but still, how many do they sell each year? The vast majority of costumers, that want a Cobalt server or a couple of Sun Blade 100, suddenly have more options. I think this is a good channel to people that want UNIX but don't need a huge setup.

Where's the Journaling Filesystem?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Seriously, I use macs for all my desktops, but since I've seen the JFS light on linux, I won't even consider running a server without a journaling filesystem. HFS+ is far too fragile - I had to reformat both my G4 and my powerbook to upgrade to Jaguar (fsck.hfs+ doesn't fix all hfs+ problems; it reports them and tells you to go find a better disk utility) and UFS doesn't have a journal.

This is marginal at best for a desktop and totally unacceptable for a server. Apple can't play in this market if they're not willing to cover some really basic software requirements. They've got some great hardware in X-Serve, but who's going to want their big RAID array if you can't store files reliably on it? They need to move beyond thinking, 'oh, we'll get lots of QTSS customers using them' if they really want to make inroads into the market.