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Apple Updates Xserve, Announces Xserve RAID
jht writes "This morning Apple introduced an updated Xserve and the long-awaited Xserve RAID. The relevant specs for new Xserve: single or dual G4/1.33, upgraded DDR 333 RAM, and FireWire 800 all added, with pricing between $2799 and $8248 for stock configs. The Xserve RAID specs: shipping in configs of 720GB for $5999, 1.26TB for $7499, or 2.52TB for $10999. It uses up to 14 180GB drive modules (each on a separate ATA/100 channel), and a pair of Fibre Channel interfaces to connect them to the Xserve."
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I look at Apple Hardware primarily as a life style thing (nice look, eye-candy & anti-M$). The raw Hardware specs - especially the processors - are not that impressive.
What I do not understand is why anybody is interested in having Apple servers. Afterall servers do not have to look good, they just have to be cheap and fast.
Have you ever seen one of these in production?
Cheap flimsy tin case, cheap plastice drive bays and the two we have sag in the middle(when put in a rack), somewhat like an old horse.
Definately not what we expected from Apple, very chintzy.
Hey, great sig! The way to tie Linux (free, open source) with Apple (proprietary hardware, closed source except for the BSD part).
Can you get me a job promoting Apple on slashdot too? How much do they pay?
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by being such an asshole)
Fuck Slashdot, use Kuro5hin. Never mind, we don't want your kind.
I about crapped myself when I saw this. No, your little FreeBSD box can't do this, sorry. ;)
Why can't it? A 3ware card will do raid 0, 1, 3, 5, and 0+1 in hardware. The rest of it is easy to build or have built.
What is left that it can't do? Should I add an Apple badge and $7000?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You are exactly right. Apple zealots would buy this but anyone else who is responsible for purchasing servers would have a hard time selling this to management.
"Ok.. now explain to me again why we should buy these 3 XServe machines rather than these 6 Xeon boxes?"
"See this little Apple symbol? it's like cool. And even while this box will sit in a rack in the data center and no one will see it, it's cool LOOKING."
"Ah yes. That makes perfect sense. Order 'em up."
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...