“While Apple’s latest Xserve uses the Intel Harpertown quad-core, Core 2 Xeon CPU, it is in all other regards the glorious antithesis of a PC server. With Xserve, Apple designed and engineered everything in-house, from the logic and firmware to the chassis and OS and admin tools. Support issues are not finger-pointed out to Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, or GNU. Like your feature requests, your support tickets can land on the desks of the engineers who created what you’re using. Xserve is built and supported to run not for one or two years, but three years, five years, and beyond. If you think I’m having you on, try to find a bargain Xserve on the refurbished market,” Tom Yager reports for InfoWorld.

“You expect the best of everything when you buy a proprietary big iron Unix server from IBM, HP, or Sun with a base of $20,000. If you want big iron Unix server features from a 1U x86 rack server with an entry price around $3,000, or $5,000 with eight 64-bit processor cores, you take your business to Apple. And unlike the big iron Unix servers, Xserve can consolidate your Windows, Linux, and even OS X servers through Parallels or VMware virtualization,” Yager reports.

“Consistency and continuity are hallmarks of Apple designs… The Harpertown model is significantly enhanced but not reworked,” Yager reports.

Read the full review here.