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Xserve Powers iTunes Music Store
Nexum writes "MacCentral has the scoop on the entire iTunes Music Store being powered by Apple Xserves. Is this the first really big implementation of Apple's server hardware? I have to admit, that even being a big Apple fan I didn't think that the Xserve hardware would be powerful enough for the severe pounding that the iTMS must have been getting. This seems like great news for Apple being able to show that they can be a real serious force in the server arena, to which they are practically a total newcomer to." I wouldn't see any reason to doubt that hardware and Mac OS X software could handle iTMS. I mean, it's heavyweight hardware, and Unix software. Still, good to see actual examples of Xserve sites in the wild.
Aren't being bought? Are you out of your mind? You know the story behind the Xserve, right?
Genentech, a biotechnology company, did some research in late 1999/early 2000 and found that BLAST, software for sequencing genetic material, could be modified to use vectors instead of scalars and get performance improvements of as much as 10X. They did some preliminary work and ran a big cluster of Power Mac G4's for a while. Then they went to Apple and said, "We want this and this, and if you build it for us we'll buy umpteen thousand of them."
Apple built it. Genentech bought umpteen thousand of them.
The net result is that every Xserve apple sells is pure profit. Genentech has already paid for the development and initial tool-up costs, and then some.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. In the late 1990's SGI designed and built a DSP coprocessor system for Lockheed. They then turned around and sold it as the Tensor Processing Unit. Of course, nobody's ever heard of those because they're very specific little devices, but it's the same basic principle.
>A similarly specced Dell 1750 (or even the superceded
e l_rkopt_1_rkopt_1750.htm)
>1650) is thousands (AU$) cheaper
Actually, I just had to price out the different configurations of different servers for my class, and the price difference is actually not that much. See below, they are both gathered from both company's online stores...
Apple XServe (http://www.apple.com.au/xserve/)
* 1 x 1.33GHz PowerPC G4 processor
* 1 GB RAM
* 3 x 60GB HDD (180 GB total)
* AU$7,398.01
Dell PowerEdge 1750 (http://www.ap.dell.com/ap/au/en/bsd/products/mod
* 1 x 2.40GHz Intel Xeon Processor
* 1 GB RAM
* 3 x 73GB HDD (219 GB total)
* AU$6,436.10
The XServe is definitely more expensive. However, keep in mind that the Dell comes with no operating system, while the XServe comes with OS X Server with unlimited clients (all the goodies of OS X like deployment license for WebObjects, etc.). So if you want a "GUI" server software, you would have to pony up for unlimited client version of Windows to compare (OUCH!). But if you just plan to use BSD or Linux on it, Dell is definitely cheaper.
-B
Apple uses sendmail running on Xserv's for their inbound and outbound relays.
They use NMS 4.15 for the message stores and for the MMPs. (Mail Multiplexors, or IMAP proxies)
They are also currently migrating to SunONE Messaging Server 5.2 for all the message stores.
Both the Netscape and SunONE Servers are running on Sun Hardware.
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