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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."
Where are your redundant power supplies? Read the site, fool! This mamma has:
;)
Redundant controllers
Redundant power supplies
Redundant fans
Redundant BUILT-IN UPS batteries (est. 72 hrs)
The drives, power supplies, controllers, fans, and batteries are all zero-downtime hot-swap. RAID 0, 1, 3, and 5, of course. No hardware two-level RAID, but Mac OS X offers 0 and 1 in software, so you could mix them to get 10 or 5+1, etc.
I about crapped myself when I saw this. No, your little FreeBSD box can't do this, sorry.
The price/performance actually isn't that bad. I've spec'ed out 1U servers, xServes and dual athlon/dual Xeon boxes. After you trick out the x86 boxes, you are pretty much in the same ballpark. :-)
Granted, you'll get faster processors on the x86 boxes... but Altivec runs encryption rather nice so your SSL routines will run fast on the G4 server.
I think it's really a well priced product, considering the type of performance you actually get out of it.
It's just too bad they didn't get an up to date CPU from Motorola. I was REALLY hoping that Moto would have delivered a PPC 7457 with 512K L2 cache... and possibly DDR FSB support... but you can never over-estimate MOTO
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
"IDE doesn't cut it"
Tell that to Google.
Both ATA100 and ATA133 devices will work. As far as I know the ATA133 devices are backwards compatible with ATA100 controllers (this is the case on my PC at home) they just operate as if they were ATA100 devices.
Chris
Unless everyone uses Mac, there really isn't a reason for one of these, is there?
FALSE! Here is what you can use an Xserve for:
Samba SMB server (for Windows and Linux)
NFS Server (for Unix/Linux)
DHCP server (all OSs)
Apache http server (all OSs)
MySQL or Postgres Servers (all OSs)
POP, IMAP and SMTP Servers (all OSs)
FTP Server (all OSs)
QuickTime Streaming Server (all OSs)
DNS (all OSs)
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
You are not making sense to me. The RAID is the 2.52TB (2.16 with RAID 5), with redundant power supplies. It has two fibre channels. And each of the 14 drives has it's own IDE bus. Try packing 14 IDE busses with hardware RAID (0,1,3,5,0+1,10,30,50), two fibre channels, redundant cooling, front panel monitoring out the wazoo, 72-hour battery backup for the RAID controllers (albeit at an additional cost) and plenty more in a 3U box.
Replacing the Xserve with commodity hardware wouldn't be too hard (hell, replace the Xserve with a PowerMac - almost the same thing, only cheaper) but replacing the Xserver RAID would be.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
any how I was mistaken--the apple web page did not mention the raid 5 so I assumed it was just the same as the old 1-U xserve. sorrty for the misinfomation
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This was only three years ago. HD size and other avances have done wonders for size of storage and heat/cooling requirements.
IDE drives on seperate controllers is a great way to get troughput comparible to SCSI systems. I beleive that there is work on getting command tag queueing available in the Linux IDE code (it may already be there). I imagine this could be avaiable in OSX shortly if not now. The need for SCSI is becoming less and less as IDE capabilities grow.
Very cool indeed.
Mecworks BLOG
I don't think so.
According to the 'Tech Specs', typical power consumption is 300 W. Not taking into account any power losses in conversions etc., this means that for 72 hours UPS you'll need 72*300/12=1800 Ah worth of batteries. I don't know what the latest research in batteries have brought us, but I don't think you can fit a total of 1800Ah in batteries in 3u rackspace (and still have room for the 14 disks).
It's obvious that it's only 72 hours of battery backed up cache.
If you read the specs you will eventually see that the serial port is for UPS, so it can take down and up the machine in good fashion.
Look at the specs again. It has redundant power supplies. The IO speeds on the xServe RAID are AMAZING.
No - both drives and controllers are backwards compatible. They simply will run at the lowest speed of the two (controller, drive).
I seriously doubt that Apple will cancel these machines. From a review last fall (which I can't remember the link to), the Xserve has jumped Apple up to around 1% or 2% of the server market as a whole. Before the Xserve Apple had maybe .25%. The Xserve is being reviewed heavy in lots of companies all over the place. Maybe not yours. But maybe yours should look at it. I also haven't seen ONE poor review of the Xserve anywhere.
The Xserves have been a bit noisy (understatement), but they've been unparalelled server boxes at my office. We haven't had one of our 5 servers go down since we bought our first last May when it was introduced. And then our other 4 last September. We've rebooted for maybe 3 security updates and a couple of OS updates. That's about it. They're great.
It's not so much the specs (which agreeably are not bad), as much as it's about the ease of setup (less than 10 minutes including rack screws), and the UNLIMITED CLIENTS. People here on /. seem to miss this one. with Sun, MS, or another standard server OS based on *NIX you have to pay per-seat lincensing out the wazoo! UNLIMITED clients for an OS which is SUPPORTED is a phenominal deal.
My $0.02
Chris Giddings President, Ripple LLC
Apple has a 10-day return policy. You can return it and order a new one or keep this one and get a credit for the difference. Call the Apple store and talk with them about it.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
If you read more thoroughly, you would have seen this right next to it:
Mac OS X Server is available in 10-client and unlimited-client editions to meet the needs of server deployments of any size. License restrictions apply only to simultaneous Mac file sharing services.
Notice the "Mac file sharing" bit at the end. I would imagine that few people are doing AppleShare serving with this. SMB and NFS is probably much more likely candidates for this box.
Bill Hayden
Also, why does IDE not do external devices
;)
I don't know all the reasons, but at least one is that the max length for an ide cable is like a foot and a half. Add to that the intervening connectors and I assume that the ide signal is not robust enough to survive such a rugged journey.
God forbid you pull a cable with the power on. Plus the SCSI cables were *expensive*.
Remember that hot pluggable peripherals is a realtively recent thing (at least affordable ones). Back then they were warning you not to unplug your parallel cables while computer/printer was on. And god forbid you unplugged your kb or mouse (this is all on a pc). Your right about the scsi cables, absolutely criminal the cost of those stupid things.
Does anyone else remember "analysts" making fun of Apple for going to USB and Firewire?
Remember, you can always spot the trailblazers, they're the ones with the arrows sticking out their backs
No biggy, they've had this for a while. There's 2 slightly differnt versions of OS X server software. The cheaper one ($499) limits you to 10 concurent file sharing connections (I think just for afp, but might be samba also), which includes a limit of 10 users connected atthe same time for thier home directories. The other version ($999) doesn't have these limits. The version that comes with all their hardware is the full one. The light one is for if you want this running on an iMac, or an older server, or to retrofit one of your towers.
Mod point free since 2001
The DB-9 connectors allow you to connect to the signaling ports on your UPSs.
"Should Apple reduce its price on any shipped product within 10 calendar days of shipment, you may contact Apple Sales Support at 1-800-676-2775 to request a refund or credit of the difference between the price you were charged and the current selling price. To receive the refund or credit you must contact Apple within 14 business days of shipment."
s alespoli cies.html#Apple%20Prices
from
http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/
-trout
There seems to be some confusion about the CPU performance for the Xserve. The fastest processor Dell offers for a 1U is a 1.4 Ghz PIII in the 1650... Yes, of course, you can get a second processor for cheaper, but 2 1.4 GHz Pentium III do not equal 2 1.33 Ghz G4s. The G4s are more like a hypothetical 2.0 Ghz Pentium III. This is the advantage of the G4; in general, it is more efficient (performance/power/Mhz). It's no accident that Apple only offers a 1U. It's the only server market segment that they can compete in. A 2U offering from Apple would not cut it on price/performance.
Also the FSB of the Dell box is only 133 Mhz where as the Xserve is 167 Mhz. Yes, it's true there is not real DDR support, but, on the whole, I'd say you're definitely not going to be hurting on performance if you get an Xserve.
I write in my journal
The most impressive thing, that I foudn, was the LDAP capability. Workgroup Manager is a joke to use, and you can set up share points for NFS, AFP, SMB, and FTP. I bought Impasse for $10 to make managing the firewall easier, and the whole thing is really nice.
We fired up a Redhat workstation, told it to authenticate against the LDAP server, and it just worked. We then NFS mount the home directory share point and we're good to go.
We're migrating over to OS X + Linux workstations, and we're moving our OpenBSD servers to Linux (it's gotten much more secure over the past two years, where our boxes got rooted all the time).
Compared to the issues of getting Samba to play nicely under Linux, this is a dream to adminster. The Xserve is our file+print server, and we use Linux for the production servers. They authenticate against the Xserve, pretty slick.
The only thing that was annoying is that Apple's Netinfo based LDAP bindings weren't standard, so mod_auth_ldap for Apache didn't pick up the groups, but we were able to modify it pretty quickly. As soon as we get ready to package it up, we'll maintain our variant and make it available (email me with questions).
The mail server is a bit week, but AFP548.com's instructions for adding Exim solved that. We now have our virtual hosts working, albeit not as elegantly as I'd like (editting text files). Hopefully OS X Server 10.3 will fix that.
AFP548.com's stunnel help was also great. Now we have everything going over SSL, so we can play inside or outside of the firewall.
The stuff that works works really nicely. It's a GREAT solution for file+print serving, LDAP serving, and mail if you don't need virtual hosts (if you do, pick up Exim from AFP548). The only thing that's annoying is that adding SSL to their IMAP server is really odd, but we stunnel it and we're all set. We even got watchdog (a great program) handling the stunnel server, so on the occaisions that it crashes, it's right back up.
Alex
The RAID 5 Controllers are redundant. There is a bridge connector between the two arrays for this purpose. The good RAID controller does processor for both arrays until the bad one is replaced.
Promise RM8000 rackmount IDE->SCSI RAID box: $2500
(8) 200GB IDE drives: $250/ea. = $2000
RAID 5 + hot spare = 1.2TB effective capacity @ $3.75/GB vs. over $5/GB for the same configuration with an XRaid
I have 5 of these boxes for raw audio storage (yes, ~6TB of audio), and for what we use them for, they're fine. I suspect Apple's new box is considerably faster for not a hell of a lot more, not to mention the fact that the drive/rack space ratio is really, really good. It's a very tempting deal, especially if you can load any ole IDE drive into it.
The Apple Xserve RAID talks CAM over Fibre Channel... CAM as in the SCSI command protocol, the same one you are spouting about. Get this through your head - each ATA drive in Apple's solution has its own channel to the drive controller - there is no need for overlapping I/O from the RAID controller to the drive, and command tag queuing just won't buy you that much. It is the job of the RAID controller to process the SCSI commands and feed them to the ATA drives. You aggregate enough drives, and you can saturate an Ultra 160 SCSI bus. Plus, on an Ultra 160 SCSI bus, you have bus arbitration overhead which gets worse as you increase the number of drives on the same bus. Let's say each SCSI drive can handle 55mb/sec throughput. That's 3 drives and you saturate an Ultra160 bus, and you won't really get 160mb/sec because of arbitration overhead. Let's say each ATA drive can do 40mb/sec - 5 of these drives and you're hitting 200mb/sec, the speed of a single 2gb fibre link. I don't think throughput is an issue here given enough drives. It's really the speed and efficiency of the RAID controller. Plus, the RAID controller has 128mb of cache on board, expandable to 512mb. Small read/writes will probably be a factor, but much of that will be hidden in the RAID machinery anyways.
The issues are reliability and value. Reliability wise, the SCSI and FC drives should be much better, but at significantly higher cost. The point of RAID is to protect you from the inevitability of drive failure. So you replace the drives more often, but at much lower cost. I think most people can deal with that trade off at this price point. Plus, from a value perspective, not only are the drives cheaper/meg, but the overall electricity cost is lower too for both powering the array and cooling the room.