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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.
it says they use the xserve on the itunes site thats it. how is this a scoop ?
Imagine the fallout if people found out Apple was using, say, IIS on 2000 Server. It would make the sales pitch for their server solutions a little tougher.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
On the back, an article about companies like Microsoft and Apple that "eat their own dog food".
Though this isn't exactly news, what else would they use???
Xserves are great, I know folks (like my boss) who didn't even consider them but once they read the specs, their eyes open, their head nods up and down slowly, and their mouth says "wow, not bad. pretty good in fact"..
Find me another server that can hold 720 gig in 1U and survive a million hits a day.
These things are awesome! Our IT guy is a part timer because our Xserves are so reliable.
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.
...and not simply a technical prowess.
I mean, Apple bashers can say all they want, but the Xserves are great machines, and the architecture proves to be scalable and reliable. Sure, they are not running at 20THz, but hell they will cope with the load of such heavy duty app like the music store.
This shows Apple dedication towards *reliability*.
I dunno if I'd like to have OS X Server running on such nice boxes, but it's Apple, it works together nicely.
P.S. : I'm a switcher, that doesn't mean I only swear by Apple products. I just try to give credits to a company that clearly tried its best to come up with comprehensive solutions.
Music is the language of the heart, the sound of the soul. -Joe Satriani
How do Xserves measure up in price to comparable x86 Windows servers? I know Apple workstations (I don't want to call them PCs and get in trouble!) like PowerMacs or iMacs cost more than most Dells or Gateways, are Apple's Xserves in a similar position to Compaq, HP, etc, servers?
hoser: Slashdot reader since 1987.
But if you don't pay the Dixie Chicks *now*, how do you expect to get paid *later*?
And what happens if you sign up with someone, and then they get carried by iTunes Music Store... what would your attitude be if I said, "Why should I be paying for Tha_Mink when I can borrow it for free?"
And as for archiving.. history and science shows us that nothing can defeat entropy, the increase in disorder and noise. The only hope is to make as many copies as possible and vainly wish that one copy somewhere, somehow, survives for later generations.
Think stone tablets, manuscripts, tomes, books. How many of those exist in which only a single copy has managed to survive?
GPL Deconstructed
And Apple sold about $14.6 million in a market of $4.47 billion. That is about 0.00326% market share, in dollars. If every one is bought at the current cheapest price ($2799) that is about 5216 machines sold. Not impressive numbers at all.
Dude Q4 estimates from 2002 are a bit stale at this point, don't you think? You really could not get your hands on an Xserve until around August last year...
cat
Back in 1996, Apple and Tower Records got together to try this new thing called 'e-business', where people used this other new thing, the internet, to spend money and buy things using networked computers.
Apple was only interested in selling iron, and had no interest in the retail side of things, much less selling CD's, books and video tapes.
Apple had suits as reps, and since Tower's IT department didn't even have email, the 'Pulse' magazine arm of Tower became the cheerleading squad for Russ (owner of Tower Records) and the gang.
Apple 'donated' three AIX equipped Shiners (200MHz), and Tower gathered a group to meld MUSE's song data and Tower's credit card backend into a website. www.tower.com belonged to some company back east, and they turned down a $10k offer for the domain, so www.towerrecords.com was it. A small group of highly talented software guys in the Bay Area were hired to code it all together*, and the growing pains began.
Fast forward to today, and we have ITMS on Xserve and Tower running the latest ASP shopping cart.
Like they say, it's the singer, not the song.
*That group was bought up by MS in a short time, and the e-shop app was shelved...never to be seen again. If you can't compete, kill the competition and bury the body in the backyard....but that's another thread.
Keep in mind that the XServe isn't only about profit. It is also about mindshare and having a broad enough hardware selection that any company could approach Apple with a need and our favorite fruit company could turn right around and tell them, "yeah, we can do that." Clustering? Big RAID arrays? Redundancy? No problem.
Sales numbers notwithstanding, it is a competitive box. In the future it will be interesting to see how many of the things fly out of the warehouse. Time will tell, time will tell...
Apple's .Mac mail servers are XServes, too, running OS X Server. Apple is eating their own dogfood. Or forging the headers to make themselves look good... I don't even care as long as the mail gets through.
you would think that apple is now using much of the technology that they produce. this is the useful demonstration that companies want to see before buying the equipment. the apple.com website, the apple store, and the itunes music store are just the thing to show off the capabilities of apple products. for example: wired, cnet, and cnn report that apple sold one million songs in the first week--sooner or later, buyer researchers learn that it was all done with xserve.
----
http://www.hellection.com
My guess is that unless a particular company needs a powerpc processor for a very specific reason, there's almost no way anyone would pick the Xserver over cheap commodity x86 hardware running Linux (despite the SCO clown show). The reason? Total control.
Wow. You're an idiot. You either (1) totally ignore, or (2) have no conception of the amount of shit you have to go through to get a "commodity x86 hardware running Linux" working and to keep it working. For-fuckin-get it.
Do you know what the biggest source of IT costs is? I'm talking about across the board, for every company no matter how big or small. Hint: it's not hardware, and it's not licenses. The biggest source of IT costs is SALARIES AND BENEFITS. In other words, the biggest money-suck in the IT department is PEOPLE.
So it's no surprise that people whose livelihoods depend on sweet, sweet IT salaries would advocate the use of the single most labor-intensive hardware/software combination on the planet. The more work required to get it going and keep it going, and the more arcane the knowledge required, the better for Joe Slashdotter. (I'm talking to you, "zaad.")
Meanwhile, companies large and small dream of the day they can fire their last IT guy. That's why IT outsourcing is such a growth industry, even in this down economy. If you move IT from a cap ex to an op ex, you'll help your bottom line.
Xserves require basically no setup or maintenance, unless you're doing something outside the parameters with them. If you want a file server, mail server, web server (or WebObjects server), database server, or cluster, setting up an Xserve takes about ten minutes, and maintaining it takes zero time until the hardware fails. No security issues to worry about (Software Update, baby), no arcane hardware drivers to massage into compatibility. It Just Works.
This explains why IT people hate it. It demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how obsolete those people are.
At worst, you'd have to develop your own custom Linux app to serve your needs. Either way, it's a lot safer than to tie my company's future to Apple.
Pffffff. This is fuckin hilarious. I love it! "Doing it my way requires extensive knowledge of obscure arcana. This is good for my job security." Hell, dude, at least you're honest.
Would this be from the same benchmark/study that innovated by using minutes containing 100 seconds, among other things? Not to mention the fact that Adobe appear schizophrenic at best about their preferred OS. My guess? They'll "prefer" any operating system that will bring in the greenbacks at a suitable pace.
Anyway. While we could debate the merits of PowerPC vs. x86 till our faces turned blue, I do agree with you on the assesment of the server market. Xserve will be a niche player, but then again, being a niche player on the whole hasn't been too bad for Apple.
some scheme by music
"Well, we were getting all these, well, I don't know what they were. These weird screens with scary messages, and those were just the complaint emails. Then we got an Xserve, and it all changed."
[Apple logo]
"I'm AC, and I just fired my IT guy."
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Having said that, an Xserve is an ideal machine for this sort of environment. Serving up the iTunes store is something that would almost certainly horizontally scale exceptionally well across lots of machines. It would be interesting to know more details about the backend - although given the hardware cost differences (you could buy four 1750s for every three Xserves) it'd be hard to justify them if you had a competent, established sysadmin team.
I may be missing something, but isn't this hardware RAID?
(From someone who -- with the annual maintenance cost for my current SANs -- could buy and throw out a fully-populated X-RAID box every quarter and still be ahead...)
I am so shocked to hear that Apple is using their own products for their own services. I mean any "proper" company will use Linux for any and all solutions dealing with computers. Come on what were they thinking!
I don't think anyone should be surprised by this. Apple is not going to use PCs who is their main competitor. So their only available options are Their products (which they get as an affordable price and have easy access to support updates etc.) or IBM/Sun solution (which is a more proven platform then theirs, but will cost more and have harder time getting support and modifying their systems). OS X is a reliable system for a server platform so their is no good reason to use an other solution. I mean Microsoft uses their Junk for their servers, IBM uses their servers, Sun uses their servers. Even if it may not be the preferred platform for the Job, If they can get it for free and have access to the people who can change the source, of the OS to fix any problems quickly, help promote their own products, Easy access to affordable hardware.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
>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
Just read a book about Digital, which had a note I found interesting / amusing: When Apple was a young company, they bought DEC computers for company record-keeping / infrastructure. DEC no longer exists per se, but it would be an interesting turnaround if at least some workgroup of former DEC employees at HPaq runs *their* infrastructure on an Apple server ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I still think the thing should be called the iRaq, err... iRac.
Michael C. Hollinger
If you think any sysadmin, software developer or manager would allow their platform to be picked on the basis that it requires a lot of people and is very expensive, you've obviously never worked in a well managed company. Profit is the motive, not hiring 30 sysadmins when 2 would do.
Just like in the automotive industry, a sysadmin or software developer needs to see the trend and move to the next viable option incrementally as to avoid their own obsolescence. I just laugh at people who say "I never thought I'd be out of a job screwing a bolt into a car door at the local GM plant".
Change with the times or fail. Either way it's your choice and it has nothing to do with "So it's no surprise that people whose livelihoods depend on sweet, sweet IT salaries would advocate the use of the single most labor-intensive hardware/software combination on the planet." unless you're a complete fool.
So Apple spun off AppleLink Personal Edition. It became America Online.
Don't make me slap you.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Of course, pedantry requires that me to point out that it is 0.00326 of the market, which is 0.326%, a hundred times larger than you calculated. A third of a percent of a huge market is not bad, especially when it's pure profit.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Not to press, but do you have a source for this? I'd love to be able to use that infomation, and credit it to mroe than a Slashdot post ;)
Colin Davis
Hi! I am thinking of setting up a small Xserve cluster for Life Science calculations. Can somebody help me with some suggestions? I barely know what an head node is.
Okay, if this was a farm of FreeBSD machines (a la Yahoo!), then nobody at all would be surprised...even if the machines weren't multi-CPU Xeons.
:-)
If they were other UNIX vendors' machines that had RISC CPUs at a "paltry" ~1Ghz...again, nobody would be surprised because "they're UNIX machines and more reliable and they're 'optmized' and they 'don't run a GUI'".
But because their Macs people seem surprised. That's a Mach kernel with some of the best elements of 4.4BSD and FreeBSD/NetBSD grafted on there for God's sake. Yes, it does have a very slick GUI available, but we're also talking about the SERVER VERSION of OS X.
Someone also mumbled about lack of RAID -- what's XServer RAID, then? Yes, it runs ATA drives...but look at the interesting architecture, you've got each drive on a SEPARATE controller. That, IMHO, negates a lot of issues that ATA has in one single swoop.
Anyhoo, kudos to Apple...iTunes music store seems pretty slick on many levels. And it's good to see them eating their own dog food
-psy
Aside from the fact that your math is a little off (0.326%, not 0.00326%), it seems to me that what you're saying is that Apple is doing better than most companies that introduced servers in the last few years. There are hundreds of companies that sell low to mid range 1U servers, and most of them would love to have a $14 million dollar quarter immediatly after product launch. A third of a percent of a multi-billion dollar market is not too shabby, especially compared to none of that market.
It's not market share or revenue that keeps you in business, it's profit. If you have enough market share and revenue to make a profit you're successful. I know it hurts you to think of Apple that way, but that's how it works.
If Apple can survive to the point when most new homes are going to be wired and have a server in the closet (and it will happen), Apple will be the one to bring ubiquitous computing to the home.
I am surprised that people should have any doubt that Xserve and Mac OS X can handle iTMS.
.mac Web service for years now.
Apple has been using its own hardware and software to power apple.com including Apple Online Store, QuickTime movie trailer and the
The QuickTime movie trailer site is the most popular on the Web, and QuickTime Player has been downloaded over 100 mln times in the last year or so. The storage and bandwidth requirement for downloading movie trailers are much higher than that for music.
To paraphrase Jobs iTMS presentation, Apple is capable of moving "ocean of bits" for video downloading, so music is really a no-brainer. In fact, a single Xerve RAID (2.5 TB) can store the 200000 songs many times over.
Apple online store is one of the best and biggest e-commerce site with annual sale in $billions.
A recent survey shows that apple.com is the #1 hardware site on the Web with 3.7 mln unique users a week, while hp.com is a distant second with 2.5 mln.
They also use WebObjects (the original enterprise application server from NeXT) for heavy lifting, which is capable of talking to multiple database systems and load ballancing. WebObjects is one of the best kept Apple secrets, and perhaps the only application server on the market that has the visual tool to automatically generate Java code for database programming.
Well, you're both right. I look at dozens and dozens of IT organizations (VC) and although managers are extremely cost conscious, they also have a deeply rooted suspicion of anything that claims to automate their jobs. It's not intentional, it's just psychology: people want to believe their hard-learned skills are valuable, and will find themselves picking holes in the cheaper, automated solution in order to justify not only their job but their value. It often takes a CFO to say, "Ok, we'll do without those 5 features that you want to custom code...buy the cheap shrink-wrapped stuff." So neither of you are a "fool" or an "idiot", but the truth is somewhere in between your extreme views.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
can be found in a little brochure Apple just sent us here at Harvard:
Lincoln (NE) Public School District
Interbrand
UNC Chapel Hill
Minnesota Wild
Riskwise
Sybase
They seem to be in some big time use at each of these places. No details really, just a little blurb and some cool pics.
Didn't I point this out already: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62298&ci d=5840334
Apple actually sold about 8000 servers in about 6 months after launching Xserve in the middle of 2002 - not bad at all for their first entry.
In contrast, Intel only managed to sell 5000 Itanium 2 systems in the whole of 2002.
Bad math skills. Sorry guys & gals.
Either way, in the server market, Apple doesn't amount to a hill of beans. There are more Linux servers sold than xServes.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Thing is, people moderate depending on whether or not they agree with what you said. The tone with which you say it merely makes moderation more likely. Therefore it is usually worth it to go out on a limb and be assertive, even abrasive, unless you are voicing an opinion that you know is going to be unpopular on slashdot. Like one of my more recent posts, stating that all the concern over palladium is paranoia, especially since it is pure vaporware. My tone was fairly vicious, and I was rewarded with a flamebait mod, and one of the two replies to me stated essentially that 'we are all slaves, you are just blind to that fact.' Whatever. That may be the majority opinion here, but it is still just an opinion and there are arguments against it. The idea of moderation is to smack down real trolls, while allowing the best expressed positions in the discussion to rise to the top. Moderation is not supposed to be a vehicle to express agreement or disagreement with posts. We have posting for that! But there are still a lot of people who would rather click a button than risk entering a discussion, even when they have an opinion to express.
But never fear, eventually your karma gets high enough and your user account gets old enough that you can meta-moderate all the unfair moderation. I have been doing that quite a bit recently, and you would be surprised how often I come across a post that is a nothing more than an assertive, valid opinion relating to the discussion at hand, that has been modded into oblivion. Obviously some moderator had an axe to grind. All I can do is rate that unfair, and hope my karma stays high enough that I am still allowed to do this in the future.
P.S. is my post that I referred to really completely and utter flamebait? You decide!
They'll bend over backwards to get you set up. You said cluster. That means multiple units. $$ka-ching$$ "What can we do for you?"
The hardware is similar to Dell's, but the over all cost is cheaper because Xserve comes with unlimited Mac OS X Server licences while MS would charge a lot for that.
Another huge benifit of Xserve is that it also comes free with a world-class application server called WebObjects which NeXT used to sell for $50k! There are also lots of other nice sysadm tools such as Apple Remote Desktop. There is no way that Lintel or Wintel servers can compete with Xserve if the truth is known.
Not impressive numbers at all.
What kind of market share would impress you? Keep in mind that XServe has been on the market for less than a year, and XServe RAID has only been around for a few months.
Pretty good from a standing start, I'd say.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple and Cray were using each other's products to design their own products in the 1980's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple's been in the server biz for a while, it's just that they went on somewhat of a "sabbatical" because they had other priorities (i.e. staying afloat, in the late 1990's). It was the Apple Network Server series, featuring IBM's AIX. Apple made some pretty good-looking servers for the day. Indeed, it's great to see that Apple's made a comeback in this vital arena - all hail Mac OS X Server!
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither do I - get Mac OS
We had a couple of guys from Adobe in the office recently. They both showed up lugging 12" PowerBooks.
:-). Really poorly designed, the x-axis is in decimal minutes - which I've never seen before.
Not a statistcal sample,just a real-life example.
Also note that the "100 second minutes" thing is due to a poorly designed graph (Adobe makes graphics software, they don't DO graphics
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I'd much rather run a busy ecommerce site under Zeus on a Solaris Sparc system than on Apache. Apache is the best all round web server IYAM (even cost aside), but Zeus is really quick. As for Solaris - it's not a great desktop platform (as a desktop OS, it's slower than Rain Main) but there is entirely no competition hardware wise in the high end server market.
It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way, I see the market as a good one for those who have altivec optimised software, or who need to run Mac OS specific software (including groups like web designers who may not be familer with Unix).
Everybody else is better off with lots of cheap x86 hardware, or a few decent multi processor Sun systems. To be honest, I have a hard time thinking that anyone would be better off with a cluster of Xserver's versus a slower but cheaper cluster of x86 clones or a more expensive but faster cluster of Sparc's.
I would certainly recommend Xserver's to design shops looking to host clients content, or to non technical commercial users looking to host commercial web sites, but that's it really.
-There are more Linux servers sold than xServes.-
Holy shit! you should like, be an editor or something, thats a real fucking scoop you came up with there. i feel bad even wasting a minute to deride you for it.
Next up: Dell sold more PC's than Apple last year. Also, stay tuned for this ground breaking expose that the Mac OS is actually easier to use and install than *nix of your choice.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Silly kids. I've been around so long and my karma is so high that I can meta-meta-moderate, so now I'll just have to go through and find all your "unfairs" and mark them as "epistemologically vexatious" (the other categories at this rarefied level of abstract subjectivity are "neoconstructionist claptrap" and "purple").
P.S. "critical of ... the republican form of government"? What are you talking about? When's the last time someone here even addressed models of representational democracy?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Ever installed Mandrake?
I didn't think so.
And it supported my pcmcia Orinoco Silver 802.11b card out of the box. Not to mention my pcmcia noname brand Firewire card. This is with the stock Mandrake 9.0 install.
If Mac OS is so easy to use, why doesn't everyone use it???
Having recently (Jan. 2002) purchased a TiBook (my first Mac ever), I did extensive price comparisons of laptops. The best choices I could find were the Sony Vaio, IBM Thinkpad, and Titanium Powerbook G4. For comparable systems, the Mac was actually cheapest. And by the way, at the time Sony didn't even make a Vaio that had all the features I was looking for.
As an aside, I've loved using my Powerbook for the past year-and-a-half, and have had minimal problems. My most recent uptime has been about 3 weeks (had to restart after Software Update).
Oh--and this is an appropriate question given the audience: Has anyone had problems starting the Terminal application after an update to Jaguar? I fiddled with settings (e.g., using bash instead of tcsh, changing a couple default directory, etc.) and Apple's Tech Support refuses to help me. I'm using the 3rd party iTerm, but can't properly map the backspace key and it's goddamned annoying. I also can't open the built-in font menu, and have no idea what's causing that bug.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
>> Apple uses Akamai for the high-bandwidth quicktime movie trailer delivery and Speedera for other things - not sure which.
>> So Apple either doesn't have the proper infrastructure or hasn't truly found the right cost/performance ratio to handle "ocean's of bits".
Akamai has the best technology to speed up content delivery, with perhaps millions of computers distributed around the world acting as intelligent proxy servers. For instance, if a company's Web site gets lots of hits from users around London, Akamai would set up a few servers near London and preload some of the content so that the data don't have to travel from the other side of the world.
Many if not most of the top companies including CNN and Microsoft use Akamai technology to avoid overloading their own Web servers.
Apple is also a very early investor in Akamai and a major stake holder (20 or 25% before IPO).
> It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way,
This is the way cost is always analyzed, and it irks me. If you have a bunch of boxes that require 10% as much administration, and 10% as much training to administrate, and cost $2000 each, compared to the other ones which cost $1500 each, then clearly the $1500 ones are less expensive.
I'm not saying that xServes DO, mind you. But your analysis of the situation is hopelessly naive... as is just about everyone else's.
If you have a stable of IT people around, and you're not interested in laying any of them off, then I guess it makes sense to get a high-maintenance solution. And more power to you... jobs are hard to come by these days. But if you're not adding your support costs into the equation, then you're doing your company a disservice.
Again, I'm not saying the xServes *ARE* that much easier to administrate. I'm just saying that it clearly didn't even enter your worldview that the subject might be pertinent.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.