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

No matter how good it is, XServe won't get in here

[BlackBolt]

Company policy (for security reasons) is that ALL software must be compiled from source. The source must be checked by our guys first, who grep the hell out of it for backdoors, etc.

We'd * * * L O V E * * * to have MacOS X in here, but it ain't gonna happen until Apple loosens up the reins a bit and lets the customers in. Look at it this way -- right now, if anybody messes with Apple in ANY WAY, no matter how small, they always sic their legal department on them and kick the offending ass ruthlessly. It stands to reason that in the event that Apple gave out source code with their stuff, and somebody tried to port OS X to x86 or whatever from the code given out with the CDs, they'd sue the living hell out of that person, leaving him gasping for air and holding his nuts. They can protect their code legally, instead of by obscurity, which harms the customer as well as Apple themselves (if you understand the "many eyes" theory). They don't have to GPL it, just include it under the same strict license they use for everything else.

I think we're coming to a crossroads, and there's two possible futures we have to choose from; the first is that we live in a completely corporately controlled bigbrother world, where we have no choice whatsoever to what hardware and software we use or how, and in which backdoors and spyware and privacy violations are simply understood, and that legally, the customer's rights are zero; or that we live in a world where we compile everything from source because of the great diversity of hardware choices and possible uses and configurations. Free Software and Open Source flourish because people have gotten tired of letting the big companies use and abuse them beyond what is right or fair. The software that is not "free as in freedom" still comes with source, because it is of great value to the customers, and the customers demanded it.

"We'll issue a security patch WHEN we have a lot of complaints. Until then, sorry, it's not worth fixing. Maybe in the next Service Patch." - actual Microsoft employee to one of our sysadmins. Of course, this was before security month or whatever, but still....

I like option number two better. I personally don't want to have to admin all our boxes and compile everything, but I like having the option to do so if required. And with computers in the future, and better languages, compiling will hopefully be faster and more "one-clicky".

Just ramblin' out loud.

BlackBolt

Re:Stupid Tax

[Perdo]

For $2,999.00 from Apple you can get an XServe with a single 1Ghz G4, 256mb of ram, 60 gig hard drive and Dual gigabit ethernet.

For $2,999.00 DIY you can buy THREE systems consisting of Dual Athlon 2000 @ 1.67Ghz, 120 gig drive,1 Gig ram and dual gigabit ethernet (2 will fit in 1u)

$3,999.00 from Apple you can get an XServe with Dual 1Ghz G4s, 512mb of ram, 60 gig hard drive and Dual gigabit ethernet.

Four Dual Athlons

$7,499.00from Apple you can get an XServe with a single 1Ghz G4, 2048mb of ram, 4 x 120 gig hard drives and Dual gigabit ethernet.

SEVEN DUAL ATHLONS.

In some cases the performance of a G4 equals The Athlon 2000. But in most cases the G4 performs indenticly to the Athlon clock for clock - with only 60% of the athlon's clock speed and only 60% of the Athlon's performance.

So we can give the Athlon a vague performance value of 32 per 1000 dollars while the Xserve gets a performance value of 3 per thousand dollars at the 3000 dollar range, 5 per thousand in the 4000 dollar range and back to 2.5 in the 7,500 dollar range.

14 Athlons at 1667 or 2 G4s at 1000mhz.

Give me a break. Don't EVER compare Apples Price/Performance to ANYTHING. God damn bleak comparison for the mac zealots. I don't know why you guys bother.

But the OS is FREE ;)