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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."
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.
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....
First off, you're using an outdated OS on the machine.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, 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
"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.
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.
The only other thing I wonder is how 7200RPM ide drives benchmark against my 10kRPM FCAL disks.
Well, your 10K disks would probably smoke these since they're only 7200 and on ATA/100. however, how much would 2.5 terrabytes cost in those 10K SCSI drives? That's what's incredible about this I think. for just over 10K you can get that much storage.
And yes there are DB-9 serial ports on tehre. they're on the Xserve servers as well. The X-line is apple's better than their previous half-assed attempts at making a real mac server(which previously were just desktop macs with extra ethernet ports).
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
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.
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