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.

demand & licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great to see. I hope that Apple can scale their production volume to keep up with the demand. I think one of the major selling points is that it comes with an Unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server, unlike any Windows 2000 Advanced Server setup. Licenses are expensive, and I know that's been a major factor in us moving away from Novell NetWare here at my university.

RAID, too

[big_oaf]

If you remember way back in May when Apple introduced the Xserve, they also previewed a 2GB RAID solution. According to this relatively old c|net article:

Apple also previewed a future storage device, the Xserve RAID, a 5.25-inch thick cabinet that can contain 14 hard drives for a total capacity of 1.68 terabytes. The system has two 2-gigabit-per-second Fibre Channel connections, a high-speed connection technology for communicating with servers.

There have been some rumblings around the Mac rumor community that this will soon debut. Can I get a "booyah"?

Synergy

[baldass_newbie]

In the article they talk repeatedly about the ability of XServe to talk with Sun boxes. They also talk about the XServe filling a niche Sun doesn't.
Is it me or would an Apple/Sun alliance make a lot of sense? I mean, besides the egos involved. You'd have server (high/low end and database) coupled with desktop.
Plus you'd have all of the stuff that MicroSoft wants working together (clean desktop for idiots, server market, stability, security) Just wondering

Re:Why is price a concern?

[Louis_Wu]

I like that. So many times in these discussions, we forget about a possible progression of events which could lead to X. (Ahem, 'X' being a variable, not necessarily a Mac OS.) When you start to think in terms of paths toward an end, getting to that end becomes more managable. It's like a ship which is off course by half a degree, you don't really notice it, but if you don't check your course mid-route, you're off by 26 miles after crossing the Atlantic. (Assuming that crossing the Atlantic is a 3000 mile trip.) A little nudge at the beginning, and you can get a big result in the end.

Take my case. I'm getting a PowerBook this week because I want the power of unix and ease of use. I like my Red Hat 7, but it's on the same machine as WinXP, where I play lots of games. So I reboot a LOT. Got tired of booting, put Mozilla on Windows, surf from there. But I can't learn Perl or use EMACS to write web pages, etc. Solution: another computer, dedicate one PC to Linux, the other to games. BUT, MacOS X has ease of use, unix, all in one shiny package. I can type in emacs while surfing in Moz, while putting my resume in a Word format (yuck, but some businesses really want it that way), while ... anything. :)

So for me the progression was Windows to Linux to Mac, because of my interests. If we could find more ways to identify specific interests and needs, we might be able to convert more people to something 'better', or set people on paths toward the better. I started using emacs on Win98. I think that started it for me. Maybe we can start others down the path of the light side in similar fashion.

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.