“Apple Computer makes cool computers. In the business world, that’s not necessarily a good thing. But when racking up 1,566 Apple Xserves, cool–in the thermal sense of the word–counts,” Thomas Claburn reports for InformationWeek.
“Defense contractor Colsa Corp. buys high-performance computer clusters for the U.S. Army. That means competitive bidding, as in the case of an Army supercomputer project that went up for bid in April. With requirements that specified footprint, power-management options, and a peak performance of 25 teraflops–computational speed surpassed by only one supercomputer in the world as of August–the company fielded proposals from six major vendors. ‘Apple won on technical [merits] and cost,’ executive VP Anthony DiRienzo says,” Claburn reports.
“Colsa’s Xserve cluster draws about a third as much power as systems that were proposed by Apple’s competitors, executive VP DiRienzo says. Apple did a great deal of engineering of its Xserve 1U nodes, DiRienzo says. The company has driven the power consumption down considerably, and it has done a lot of sophisticated engineering to get the heat out. “We’ve been racking up a lot of different types of these clusters, and [with] a lot of them, once you put 30 of them in a rack, you can’t turn them up to full power because they can’t dissipate the heat,” DiRienzo says. But Colsa’s Xserve cluster, dubbed Mach5, which should be operational this fall, draws about half a megawatt of power. The systems proposed by the competition required up to three times that. As a consequence, some of the competing systems required more processors, which drove up the cost,” Claburn reports.
“Apple–cost competitive? The Army was as skeptical as anybody familiar with the business-technology market, DiRienzo says, asking the usual questions: ‘Why are you going to put it on Apple? They’re more expensive. Are you going to get the same thing out?’ But the project worked so well, ‘they were very supportive of us as we went through this solicitation and this acquisition,’ DiRienzo says. ‘They’re happy with the performance that the Apples should give.’ They’re especially happy with the price tag: $5.8 million. The next-closest bid came in at $7.4 million,” Claburn reports.
Full article here.
And the truth shall set you free. Welcome to the real world, I’m glad you figured out what some of us have known for quite some time now.
Slowly the whole world is finding out what we all know. If you want and or need the best, go to the best and leave the crap for the rest. GO APPLE!
Don’t be a wiseass, JB.
Just be happy that they’re finally friggin’ getting it, albeit about 10 years late.
Jeez, Fred Mertz, cut him some slack. From my viewpoint, you both have about the same wiseass quotient in your statements. And you’re both right.
Slowly the whole world is finding out what we all know.
I don’t know, Thomas. I kinda like our cult status…
Go Army, be all you can be.
Realistically, Apple has only just started to catch up with raw power in the processing world but that is due to IBMs chip which was however integrated by Apple. The G3 should have exploded much faster and the G4 took it’s time as well. Motorola just wasn’t cutting it.
I think since the 1Ghz G4 mark that Apple could finally claim a place in the “powerful” computer race. But for quality, Apple has been hands down leader for years. Just don’t get the 2 confused.
I dont think it is a question of folks waking up to the Mac advantage in this instance -the gear these guys are buying has only been available for a short while.
My theory: PowerBook and desktop G5 buyers are subsidising these machines, which is why they’re soooo cheap.
(yes, I’m just stirring)
>Why are you going to put it on Apple? They’re more expensive.
Is that how smart the army is? Don’t these guys ever do any analysis before pullin’ the trigger?
Wait, I get it. It turned out to be 1.4M cheaper. But who cares … it’s only the taxpayer’s money, right?
This goes to show you how hard it is to change a mindset once it is established. Apple established the mindset, and now they are changing it. In fact, they changed it a few years ago, but people are finally starting to wake up.
notatotalsucker –
i have worked for DOD and civilian contractors, and know the huge difference in the process – government agencies are not allowed to accept bids on hardware that are below cost, so realistically, they are not losing any money on the machines, just not profiting much.
Berkley is currently bidding for a similar cluster, 900+ machines, all at only a fraction below the educational cost. so, probably saving 15-18% per machine.
The U.S. Army is finally following it’s own punch line, they’re being all that IT can be.
that comment about the army being 10 years late is a little misleading.
Apple had no machines worth clustering 10 years ago. Arguably, the generation 1 xserves weren’t much of a bargain either.
I love all the articles. It helps when I spread the gospel.
I know something is working b/c my die-hard Windows only friend conceded and told me, “You win – Macs are better.”
I’ve forwarded this to my boss. They’re evaluating Sun and Windows servers at the moment. Not reason not evaluate Apple servers too.
Just got my MarketWatch alert. Apple just hit $40 per share. Woo hoo.
Jadis—holy shinto!
“Is that how smart the army is? Don’t these guys ever do any analysis before pullin’ the trigger?”
Sure they do, but despite what their analysis may say, sometimes someone (*cough* the administration *cough*) puts a gun to their head and says “OK, so it’s a bad idea based on data we’re not sure about, and it will turn into a massive government spending program. But we don’t care, we are telling you and the other armed forces to go invade anyway.”
“Is that how smart the army is? Don’t these guys ever do any analysis before pullin’ the trigger?”
Sure they do, but despite what their analysis may say, sometimes someone (*cough* the administration *cough*) puts a gun to their head and says “OK, so it’s a bad idea based on data we’re not sure about, and it will turn into a massive government spending program. But we don’t care, we are telling you and the other armed forces to go invade anyway.”
This is how it will all turn around…a slow migration from myth to fact has been happening the last few years, and the results are finally starting to come in. Eventually, public expectations will catch up with reality, and that will be a very good day for Apple.
WIndows makes me happy
Then OSX will make you ecstatic.
Don’t all forget though, as much as we would love everyone to move to mac, that will put us right back where we started.
As in if everyone got a mac then we’d all get virus’s etc cause we’re the biggest target.
Apple needs to seriously reconsider their pricing though. I know they don’t churn ’em out by the truckload like windows machines, and that could be a factor in their high price. But for example I had to have my HD replaced in my iBook and if it wasn’t for the warranty it would have cost me just over �0(Australian). FOR A HD. and it was only 40gig. Even the guy in the mac shop said I’d be better off getting a third party HD for a couple of hundred.
oopps i meant $900