“At its core, Xserve is a two-socket Core microarchitecture Xeon (Woodcrest) rack server. As I wrote in my review, in hardware design, Xserve lives up to market standards. Some touches, like the SAS/SATA drive bays, a PCI-X slot for existing expansion cards and the SuperDrive dual-layer DVD burner, help tip the scale in Xserve’s favor. But the reason to buy Xserve is OS X Server: No other server app platform rivals it, and no other server system runs it. If you want OS X Server, you need a Mac, and Xserve is the only Mac that’s equipped with external drive bays and a baseboard management controller,” Tom Yager writes for InfoWorld.
Yager writes, “It is an absolute sin to let any of that firepower and capacity go to waste. There are all kinds of ways to shuffle and reconfigure for load balancing and fail-over. If you play it right, bringing in a new server means knocking out an older, slower server. Maybe more than one. Or buying a faster server in the first place obviates the need for the second or third server that would have been required based on old school rules of thumb.”
“I have tested, and continue to run in a production setting, two instances of Windows 2003 Server hosted by Parallels Desktop, running on OS X Server 10.4.8 on a 3 GHz Xserve. To skip to the punch line, it works, and it’s as fast as all get-out. Parallels does not stretch the truth when it claims near-native performance; Xserve is capable of knocking off any two-socket Netburst (Pentium 4) Xeon server going back at least two years. Compared to Xserve, those Intel boxes eat more electricity and give off more heat than they give back in capacity for work,” Yager writes.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Computerworld: Enterprise decision-makers should consider migrating to Mac OS X and Apple hardware – December 21, 2006
Apple’s Mac means business – December 18, 2006
Hands on: Parallels Desktop for Mac in a business setting – December 10, 2006
InfoWorld: Apple’s Mac OS X platform deserves good, hard look by enterprise – September 22, 2006
Prejudice keeps Apple Mac out of the enterprise – September 01, 2006
Boot Camp: Apple’s Trojan horse into the enterprise market? – April 05, 2006
What he said. ^
Now all we have to do is convince 99% of all senior IT guys that Xserve and OSX Server are worth trying out in “their” environments.
DLMeyer – the Voice of G.L.Horton’s Stage Page
“Compared to Xserve, those Intel boxes eat more..”beans and give of more gas… And they have an unlimited number of users, as opposed to win 2003 where you pay through the nose per seat.
….but you might not need as many IT administrators and tech hands to keep a system as effecient and easy to use as Xserver running…so why would any IT manager suggest this to the CFO?
Of course, the real qustion I have is this:
WHY IS THERE A FRACKIN’ WINDOWS CURSOR AD AT THE BOTTOM OF OUR MACDAILY FRACKIN’ NEWS SITE WHOSE ULA STATES IT’S NOT SPYWAE< BUT WE ALL KNOW FRACKIN’ BETTER N’ THAT, DON’T WE, BETTY FRACKIN’ BOOP!
Of course, it reminds us of how far we’ve come and of the sins of our past. Kind of like Passover matzoh. And the wine to remind us of the blood put over the doors of our ancestors to keep out the Angel of Death. We should not be upset at the Windows ad, but contemplate about where we are in our lives now and where we should rightly be…sitting right here in front of a Macintosh.
Amen and Amen
Don’t worry guys, the IT managers are testing Xserves in their own environments. At least the good ones are…
What the hell is this guy’s problem? Never, ever, ever deploy Apple equipment in the enterprise. Don’t even think about it.
You buy Dell. Don’t look anywhere else, just buy Dell and run Microsoft Windows Server products on it. That’s all you need to know.
I take that back. Get whatever hardware you want as long as you run Windows Server on it. That way I can keep my job. Got a lot of time and energy into my MSCE certification and I don’t want to waste it.
You don’t “kill” Windows servers, you put them out of their misery.
Had a guy join our men’s monday morning breakfast group two weeks ago who is a “true blue, in real life, in the flesh” IT guy for a major cellular provider here in Socal. We got to talking and I asked him straight out about the OSX server, would he ever use it, and his thoughts on Windows vista. His surprising answer to all three was to reiterate the old saw about job security. Seriously. He literally said he wouldn’t recommend OSX because it would cause him to be less needed, and that when Vista came out he was looking forward to an even bigger annual budget with the ability to hire more techs.
I had always thought this argument a bit specious, but he was straight faced and not kidding.
amazing.
“But the reason to buy Xserve is OS X Server: No other server app platform rivals it”
This statement is the most amazing in the whole article! Go back to Panther Server and remember how many people were complaining that it paled in comparison to Winblows Server 2003. Now with Tiger, the playing field is level. I think Leopard Server will turn even more heads.
Interesting times, indeed!
@ Jim
“Mens’ Monday morning breakfast club”? What the Heck? that’s an oxymoron if there ever was one.
Having recently installed OS X Server in my Windows environment I can confidently say that XServe is not yet ready to take over the multi-server Windows corporate space. However powerful OS X Server is, it is still Unix and it is not possible to implement without resorting to command line tools and their laborious long-winded typographical-error prone keystrokes. There is little or no online help; no context help; the documentation is sparse and entirely devoid of solutions and examples for any but the most basic implementations.
OS X Server is undoubtedly powerful, and I am sticking with it because, despite its problems, Windows has bigger problems. But Apple has a LOT of work to do to beef up the GUI so it is actually useful.
So stay real guys. It will happen, but the time is not upon us quite yet…
You don’t “kill” Windows servers, you put them out of their misery.
Not quite true. When you kill a WIndows server, you actually put it out of my misery.
Stuff intel Xeon “woodycrest”! I think for Apple’s servers they should offer two solutions: an Xserve with an Intel processor and an Xserve with a highly superior IBM PowerPC cell processor running at 3.2 GHz. No one’s going to be running windows server on the Xserve so there’s no need for an Intel “woodycrest” is there? And even if you are going to run windows server on it the you could choose the Intel Xserve.
“Now all we have to do is convince 99% of all senior IT guys that Xserve and OSX Server are worth trying out in “their” environments.”
Except that they can run virtual servers under Windows without introducing another OS into the mix. What’s the point of OS X if all you’re using it for is to run two virtual Windows servers? Why not just re-format it and run Windows natively?