Slashdot Mirror
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."
wouldn't this be a great xserver for thin x clients? just a thought. and no i don't intend it to be funny.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Finally they release this thing. I've been waiting for this hardware since last MWNY. But anyway. Have you taken a look at the pricing for the 2GB PCI Fibre cards they're selling? $500. Good god that is cheap. I haven't seen a decent fibre card for less than $1500 (retail). Must have this hardware (actually, I will once it ships). Yay for me. More fibre stuff.
Client : I want something really big, and really fast, and really cheap.
Me : Then you don't want anything from these guys (M$).
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Does it seem ironic to anyone else that the original main supporter of scsi is now doing ATA software raid in their high end server products?
It's stylish, despite the fact that most would have it sitting in a rack, in some datacenter, far from eyes. But it's still metalic, pretty, smooth, and clean.
Well from the spec's its got hot swapable redunant power supplies, hot swapable redundant cooling subsystem, hot swapable redundant RAID controllers, hot swapable RAID cache battery backup (72 hours), and supports fibre channel output, through a well priced card. Saying IDE doesn't cut it is a bit of a generalisation.
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.
...on the Xerve RAID. Good to see Apple continues to include such essentials.
"Not particularly impressive."
Just like your reading ability....
I think the XRAID looks great. In addition to all of the things it has, despite the first post in this thread, IDE turns out to be a much better alternative to SCSI than most people realize. In fact, Slashdot went over this here. As a cheap alternative that can be just as fast, I am glad Apple is pushing it, because it makes costs go down across the board.
Also, I would like to see the breakdown of the claim that someone could build the same thing for half the cost.
Boom Shanka
First off, you're using an outdated OS on the machine. No multitasking, that's why your machine is crawling. Secondly, you offer no specifics on hard drive speeds or bus speeds so I can't help you there. Next, pitting NT against anything that Apple did before OS X is a losing battle for Apple. If you want to see a really impressive dual, put a new Apple G4 tower against a newer PC. i do it at work, on my desk a dual 1Ghz g4 tower versus a Dell 2.2 Ghz. Both with 1.5 gigs of ram. The Mac outperforms it consistently. What you really need to do is update your hardware or stop using Macs if they bother you so much.
A while ago I bought two xserves to act as diskserves to a linux cluster and to backup my desktop macs. I bought these machines because I felt they were a good deal. I got bids on several pc based linux disk servers, as well as several NAS boxes. I was comparing 480GB machines. a high quality generic brand (supermicro) with scsi disks and dual Gigabit ran about $8000 (at the time). The lowest bid I got was $5000 but the unknown quality and reputation of the vendor was not satisfactory. The mac xserves ran just under $7000 using IDE disks with 4 indepenedent masters (out performs the scsi). Additionally the mac had other nice features such as: 1U versus 3U. hot swap. advanced admin tools.
I bought both the apple and supermicro based systems in the end and can compare them directly. . after I unpacked the mac I was even more impressed with the high quality construction and ease of access to the interior in comparison.
first the good news:
What really made it for me on the macs was the fact that I had to hire a sysadmin to correctly set up my linux box with load balancing, Ldap, mail server, and moreover to keep it patched and to monitor it. On the macs I set them up myself. No detected problems with load balance. and the mac tools let you set up nearly all the services you might want with an intuitive gui.
Actually, I had a few snags but even here I have to give apple a good reprot card. they chancged how they did network admin right when I got my box. so all the documentation was for the obsolete tools and none for the new. So I got things really screwed up with services I could not turne off once turned on. The machines would gag when they could not find their ldap serviers or when they were cut off from the internet. But I called apple on the free service plan. after a ten minute wait on came a guy who really knew his stuff and spent about an hour with me getting all of my various problems sorted out and teaching me the new system. And in fact the next day he called me back! said he had another idea about a question i had asked him. I was really impressed on the customer service. its much better than for my other mac computers. Since then Ive had mac people call me back three times with ideas for me. Now that the new tools are better docuimented (still a few gaps), life is easy.
perhaps the best feature is the software update feature. I get patches and new tools delivered automatically and have the confiudence they wont screw up my all apple configuration. thus I still have not needed a sys admin. At the purchase time I had considered some NAS boxes (e.g. iomega,snap...) for the purpose of making sys admin simple. But these things have lousy throughput for the price and aren't versatile computing machines.
Now the bad news:
However I have had three problems with my xesrves that I dont have with my linux box.
first no raid 5. that's absouluetly maddening. I bought a raid 5 solution from a third party but I'm nervous it wont be effieicnt or it will die someday when I do a self-update that makes it incompatible.
second, and this compounds the above problem is the UFS/HFS+ dichotomy. while macs do run UFS, they dont do it effieicently or with any advanced features like journalling. Moreover the OS and some mac apps wont work unless they are on UFS. so you always have to have a HFS+ partition. but wait! you cant partition a raid disk with different file systems (on apple) so this means if you want to have any hfs raid the whole disk has to be HFS+. on our four disk Xserve this means I ended up with two disks RAID1 HFS+ and and two disks UFS raid 1- a whopping 120GB of UFS out of my 480GB (raw) can be UFS. yuck!. fortunately there is now a partionalble raid 5 soultion from a theird party which fixes this issue. (the reason I wanted UFS, was because even though I lost some effieiceny i wanted no surprises for my linux systems due to the filenaming case sensitivity)
The third problem I have had is that while the admin tools are wonderful and run on remote machines, there are a few tools and apps that will not run remotely. for example, if I want to use the GUI software update remotely, I cant. I have to use the terminal CLI tool. This is not too bad, but its just an example. if you use other gui tools, like brickhouse firewall or whatever, you have to go to the terminal attactched to the machine.
My work around for this is to use OSXVNC which does the job. However there is a catch I dont like. You cant use osxvnc on a headless mac. that is you have to have a display device connected to the mac to use osxvnc!! there's no way I want to have a display for each mac xserve. Of course I could use a KVM switch but my preference would be that it should be unneccessary for remote admin. my work around here is that I can fool the macs by briefly connecting a display to them after boot. I can then unplug the display and OSXVNC will still work on my headless mac.
My conclusion is that apple has a wonderfulhigh quality machine. And it will work perfectly for you if you dont require UFS or remote admin of GUI based apps. When I bought my system I had just had a bad experience with 20 athalon servers that had died from heat delamination of the fans and were unstable due to current glithces from the cd roms. I was thus very risk averse. when I bought the apples I knew I was buying peace of mind, and not paying extra for it. I had no idea what good customer service I was going to get. PLus I did not realize I could also buy a complete replacement part kit (down to the motherboard) to have locally. Since my experience with their customer service I bought the extened warantee. its lot cheaper than a sys admin.
when mac comes out with native raid5 and someone writes a VNC that can run headless all will be well.
p.s. I apologize to the few slashdotters who are outraged when a post is reposted. this review was posted as a sub comment to a sub topic on an earlier artilce today. rightfully it belonged in this thread so I reposted it here.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, 640MB ought to be enough for anybody.
Well, I think it's official now; the letter X has been overused. First, we had X11 and all the things named after that, then Window XP and OS X. Now Xserve?
I think we all know where this is headed - it's going to be like the South Park where they say 'shit' 162 times and the Knight of Standards and Practices are going to come and kick us around for overusing the letter. Again, real-like imitates South Park
Njord
The letter X was made to vex - Edward Gorey
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.
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
Is it just me, or are there a DB-9 serial ports on the controlers.. I thought Apple considered RS-232 legacy and obsolete?
I work on a ProFibre DF4000 system.. and the serial port is the best way to configure the system. The *gak* windows based in-band management software is crap.
The only other thing I wonder is how 7200RPM ide drives benchmark against my 10kRPM FCAL disks.
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.
Look at the specs again. It has redundant power supplies. The IO speeds on the xServe RAID are AMAZING.
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.
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
"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
Is this really a cheap solution?
Yes.
Just a few months ago, last summer I think it was, I was looking for inexpensive RAID solutions that included Fibre Channel to the host and IDE on the back end. Performance wasn't an issue for us; capacity was, and reliability was somewhere in the middle of the importance stack. (Our customers were willing to accept occasional down-time, but were very price-sensitive.)
I found a system from a company called Chapparal-- I have no idea if I spelled that right. This system used IDE drives, bridged inside the box to SCSI, which was in turn bridged outside the box to Fibre Channel. Performance sucked ass, and it didn't have redundant anything, but the price was right: $10,000 a TB.
Now, just six months later, Apple-- a company known for higher-than-average prices-- is selling a technically superior and much better built box with twice the storage for roughly the same price.
While I wouldn't classify this as a cheap solution-- it's too well built and has too many features to be called "cheap"-- it's definitely a good deal.
I write in my journal
I write in my journal
...they should consider adding an 802.11g interface to the iRaq. They could call it AirRaid.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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
You have a point with ECC to a certain extent, but the PSU is a non-issue. Dell is the only Tier 1 vendor that supplies a back-up PSU, and it's jury-rigged at that... It's not standard issue. Why not take the Xserve to task for the lack of redundant cooling as well? The 1650 has it... By the very fact that the Xserve does not have redundant PSUs or cooling, it is aimed at a different market segment than the one that requires absolute 100% up time, and therefore ECC is not that much of an issue. The single cosmic ray that switches a single bit during a year is not going to matter much to the market the Xserve is aimed at. The 1U market is based on price, including space, and performance, not on reliability. Obviously, it can't be a piece of crap, but... I'm sure if Apple made a 2U unit they would include redundant everything, but then they also would need to come up with a processor that can compete with the Xeons in 2u units. Maybe when the 970 comes out, but not now... Anyhow, why is it that everyone assumes the people at Apple are stupid? They have done a fine job at finding the right balance for the right market segment. Obviously, if you NEED ECC or redundancy, don't buy an Xserve. It's pretty simple... Although I can understand your disappointment over not being able to buy one because you do need those things... ;-)