“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