“Apple is known first and foremost for its consumer-oriented technology. The common DNA between products like the iPod or MacBook Air is a consistent, graceful and elegant interface that prioritizes the end-user experience. Dedication to a user friendly formula and modernist design has enabled Apple to claim a successful niche in a computer marketplace crowded with commodity PCs,” Aaron Weiss reports for Datamation.
“But Apple’s strong focus on lifestyle consumers sometimes obscures the fact that the company also makes and markets servers aimed at business customers. The server room might not seem like a natural habitat for a vendor that puts as much emphasis on appearance as function, but server duty is not as much of a stretch as it might seem for Apple. The visual polish of Apple’s critically acclaimed OS X platform is built on a complete Unix backend, which is certainly no stranger to server racks. In fact, Apple has packaged a server-oriented version of its platform, called OS X Server, which it includes with its rackmount series of servers, the Xserve,” Weiss reports.
“Xserve offers a one-box solution, which is Apple’s bread-and-butter. Organizations with an interest in media serving will find the Xserve an especially facile environment to get up and running with a minimum of hassle compared to PC servers. Smaller businesses without an existing investment in PC servers or expert IT admins will find the Xserve an accessible, low-fuss route to hefty server power. And, of course, for anyone already comfortable with and loyal to the Apple experience, the Xserve provides a familiar environment without sacrificing features or power to its PC-based peers,” Weiss reports.
Full review here.
We have five XServes in my small business. Love them. I can manage them myself…no IT guy needed. Brought our website and email in-house, and keep all the company files on it, with permissions for the various users. Very good product for small business.
We used to have XServes and they were great. But, when the Intel ones came out and we saw that they were way more power hungry, we moved to the Intel Mac minis instead. They do the job just as well as the G5 XServes did.
Now, if Apple just paid as much attention to the server market as much as this guy makes it sound like they do.
Do X-Servers play games?
Your potential. Our passion.™
Do PC’s work?
Your crap. My disgust.
My company has about 30 of these in production use now. They have been incredibly reliable, and require virtually no maintenance.
We are an application service provider, providing software to the legal industry. We are now the largest in our market.
One of the reasons we chose these machines was so that we could grow our business “on the cheap”. We didn’t have to hire an IT guy back then, and we didn’t have to spend 5 minutes worrying about viruses and patches from Micro$oft. Take that Zune Tang®!
By having these servers, we could concentrate on growing our products and customer base without having to spend any extra time about our public facing servers.
Highly recommend these systems!
“Do X-Servers play games?”
Yes. With all that power, Solitaire absolutely flies!!!
I’m curious how Apple, which promotes its “green” credentials, would release a box notably more power hungry than its G4/G5 predecessors. And a “hot box” requires even more power for cooling. Data centers are every municipality’s nightmare, given their power demands. One justification, among others, for the move to Intel was the “power per watt” value proposition. The Xserve doesn’t seem to fit that notion. Can someone explain?
Raymond from DC: Please can we just try to have one single day without “green speak”?
I’m just tired of the believers in the unholy profet Al Gore.
@ Raymond, we are going to use the heat from our new Xserve to heat the employee pool.
Actually, we’re getting ready to deploy our spanking fresh new software on a spanking fresh new Xserve any day now. Can’t wait!
Oh BOB… “Please can we just try to have one single day without “green speak”?”
Sionce when does talking about power consumption and power per watt constitute “green speak”?
I pay per watt for electricity. I’d like my costs to go down.
We need lots of storage and servers to deal with our video services.
So, Yeah, I’d like the XServe to use a few less cents if it could and not a few more. Oh yeah, I’d also like to not have to cool to our data center even more than before, and save some money there too.
I have bad news for you:
The Earth is older than 6000 yrs old.
The Flintstones was not a documentary.
I’m just tired of the denial in science fact.
B, what was it about ZT‘s message that you thought it was “serious”? Really, now, asking if a server plays games? And, even if it WAS a “serious troll”, what’s with the hostile attitude? Too many steroids? A simple <snicker> would have sufficed.
Bob, a “prophet” foretells the future and a “profit” is what George Bush’s pals make off the blood of soldiers … but I don’t know what a “profet” might be. Do you?
Raymond, it isn’t just “green”, Bluefin pointed out, watts cost money. Money matters to many of us, even if “green” does not.
Are X-Serves as noisy as they used to be? We don’t have a server room, so would like to configure an X-Serve to work in an office setting without a special cooled box, etc. Is this possible?
@ Dialtone
Yes, they are noisy. They aren’t as bad as they the very first generation models, which were insanely noisy, but there will be no question you have one unless you can put it inside of something else!
If you just need a single server in your office, why not get a PowerMac?
Raymond from DC: I’m curious how Apple, which promotes its “green” credentials, would release a box notably more power hungry than its G4/G5 predecessors. And a “hot box” requires even more power for cooling. Data centers are every municipality’s nightmare, given their power demands. One justification, among others, for the move to Intel was the “power per watt” value proposition. The Xserve doesn’t seem to fit that notion. Can someone explain?
Well, the Xeons provide several times the effective performance of the G5, so you get a larger increase in performance than the increase in wattage. If you don’t notice the difference in performance because you never fully exploited even the G5, a Xeon XServe won’t give you an advantage, of course. Maybe look at a Mac mini in that case – even it will be faster in most respects than the old G5.
Dialtone: Are X-Serves as noisy as they used to be? We don’t have a server room, so would like to configure an X-Serve to work in an office setting without a special cooled box, etc. Is this possible?
XServes are optimized to take as little space as possible in a server rack, and the cooling solution reflects that optimization: Compact but noisy.
A Mac Pro, on the other hand, gives you even higher performance (if you want) and it is optimized for near-silent office usage at the expense of a much larger mechanical design. For what you need a Mac Pro would indeed seem to be the optimal choice.
We use 2 Xserves at work (old models -G4’s) and even though we ran into some problems with third party apps, we are very satisfied with them when used strictly with OS X server. Uptimes are long (like forever it seems). No doubt we will buy more in the future.