The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

You may recall my earlier story about Apple's rackmount server platform (If not then click here). Well, now the servers have been formally announced. The new Mac will ship in June and they call it an Xserve.

Here are some of the spec's:
* 1 Rack unit high (approx. 1.75 inches)
* Hot-swappable ATA 100 drives
* Single or dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processors
* 2MB DDR L3 cache per processor, 1:1 L2 cache
* 3 PCI slots -- two of which are 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI slots (up to 533MB/s throughput)
* Up to 2 gigs of DDR memory running at 266 MHz
* A VGA graphics card that supports headless booting (defaulting to 800x600 dpi)
* An optional AGP 4X (Radeon 8500) graphics card
* Three FireWire ports with two on the back panel and one on the front panel
* Two USB ports, one DB-9 serial console port
* Optional Ultra 160 SCSI card
* Two Gigabit Ethernet ports
* Front-panel status lights
* Optional fiber Gigabit Ethernet adapter
* Mac OS X Server software including QuickTime Streaming Server, WebObjects, Apache, Samba, PHP, MySQL and Tomcat
* Native protocol support for AFP over TCP/IP, SMB/CIFS, FTP and NFS
* New remote monitoring software, including the use of SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data from each hard drive

Some of Apple's thoughtful enhancements:
* The Xserve chassis slides out of the rack on a rail with a cable-management arm to keep cords from tangling
* Doors slide open for easy access to drives, PCI cards and fans
* A DB-9 serial port for monitoring and control of your headless server
* The optional Radeon card for those who prefer to use it as a rackmount workstation (an expensive, but forseeable use of this Mac)
* Each drive is on an independent bus. This minimizes the awful speed hit of using ATA drives.
* For needy customers, a new AppleCare plan with 24-hour on-site support
* For the technically proficient, Apple offers user-servicable replacement parts kits

Apple could have used 333 MHz DDR memory and a faster system bus. The Xserve could have ATA 133 drives or built-in Ultra 160 SCSI instead of slowpoke ATA 100 drives. It lacks redundant power supplies. The server is (predictably) based on Mac OSX Server, which still has some security and stability issues and does not yet support trunking (using 2 ports for double the bandwidth) or multiport ethernet cards. But these criticisms are relatively minor. Xserve isn't designed for high-end enterprise solutions. Instead, it is just about perfect for mid-range office and small enterprise use. It's a small, fast, flexible solution that fits into a rack. It can run headless, and it has a serial port for command-line access and control, which means that it is somewhat more secure, you don't need to reserve rack space for a monitor, and if something goes wrong you can hook it up to the same dumb terminal that you use to maintain your other UNIX server hardware in a machine room.

For those netizens who criticise the Mac for the difficult and space-consuming rackmount-kits, get ready for this: forty-two of these babies can fit in a full rack, bringing up to 84 G4 (with AltiVec) processors online.

Pricing starts around $3,000 on the single-cpu model -- already at the high-end of the single-cpu server price-scale -- but with DDR memory, 3 PCI slots and an unlimited user license for OS X Server (a $1,000 value), it's not as excessive as it might seem. On the other hand, the $7,800 "Ultimate" dual-proc server is... well, scary. Phil Schiller compares the Xserve to a $20,000 Sun Fire 280R, but I would compare it to the $1,000 V100.

Several popular enterprise software developers have offered support for the Xserve, including Oracle, Sybase and HP.

...And just to tease us some more, Apple pre-announced an upcoming Fibre channel RAID solution, due at years' end. Such a hardware RAID would resolve the ATA limitations of the Xserve platform and greatly enhance its value.

All in all, very respectable. Maybe not a candidate for world-domination, but they took a nice step forward.