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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.
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
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
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.
Like jo_ham said, you have to be very careful comparing Macs & Dell/Gateway/HP/etc. products. Once you spec out features to as close a level as possible, the Macs actually do come out ahead on most (not all, but definitely most) fronts.. especially with recent price slashes on the laptops and consumer lines.
As far as the XServe goes, if you break it down per-gigabyte or per-gigaflop, the prices compare very favorably. Check out the website ( http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ ) for the XServe RAID box for Apple's quoted comparisons if you like.
And plus, just look at all those blinkenlights!! I've seen both an XServe + XServe Raid playing an HDTV file on a 23" Cinema display, and a small rack of XServes chugging happily away on.. well, something.. and they're quite sparkly. Mmmm, blinkenlights..
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.
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?
>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
Because some high calliber investigative journalists at MacCentral (as site dedicate to Apple news) have managed to read a web page that has only been up for a little over a month! Impressive, huh?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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
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.
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.
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."
I recently did some benchmarks on the Xserve RAID. Performance is quite good, but I had only limited access and I couldn't change the configuration. With a RAID 5 array of 7 drives on a single controller, I got about 92 mb/sec sustained throughput on multi-gigabyte file sizes. Remember that most I/O benchmarks I've seen are easily fooled by cache and therefore can quote some ridiculous numbers. That compares quite favorably to its competition - I get about 75mb/sec in equivalent testing on a Mylex FFX Fibre-Fibre 1Gb RAID controller talking to 6 x 10krpm FC drives in RAID 5. Importantly, as we scaled up the number of readers/writers, the total overall throughput stayed the same. Stride reading/writing was pretty good too... so the RAID controller in the system is pretty decent.
Unfortunately, I didn't get comprehensive results. I hope to do that in the next month.
The only major limitation with the Xserve RAID is the lack of active-active failover of the RAID controller. In its price range, that's not a big deal, as often the second RAID controller costs about as much as a 1 terabyte Xserve RAID.
-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