Was looking in to this for both HP and Dell, Apple are quite competitive, when most Windows servers come without things like operating systems and hard drives! Devil's in the detail as they say...
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Apple Updates Xserve to Nehalem Processors
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Was looking in to this for both HP and Dell, Apple are quite competitive, when most Windows servers come without things like operating systems and hard drives! Devil's in the detail as they say...
Especially as you get an unlimited client version of OS X Server for it. Try buying an unlimited client version of Windows Server (I know you can't) and see how much that costs you...
I actually started a thread here awhile back asking if the Xserve could be used as a regular Mac Pro (provided my desk was big enough.) You know, with a cinema display sitting on top. MR's knowledgable Xserve users pointed out how LOUD they are...(I never got to mess around with one until a few weeks ago so I didn't know.) And yeah, even one lone Xserve puts out a fair amount of racket in a quiet room.
The dream I've been having involves a cluster of Mac Pros and a huge, multi-room Xserve farm.
Apple really needs to make a 4U Xserve and reintroduce an Apple RAID. 
I'll definitely give them that. Licensing costs for OS X server are unbelievably generous. Microsoft's are through the roof!
This is great news. I am very encouraged to see that Apple has maintained a strong commitment to the Xserve. My business depends on them. Not a Windows server in the house!
For the average user yes. But webservers for instance need to cache a lot of data. And you can only put so much RAM into a server so there's a lot of swapping (putting the data from RAM to the hard drives) going on, to manage all the temporary data for all the users accessing the web browser. Hard drives for this purpose are usually faster (1500 rpm is pretty standard) but smaller (necessary to keep them fast yet reliable and affordable) than your average consumer drive. So SSDs can really shine here, they're using way less power and don't require as much cooling as 1500rpm hard drives which can mean significant saving on a server rooms power consumption (server power and cooling power). I believe SSD are still a bit slow in terms of write-speeds though so they might still be a disadvantage in some applications.
Depends on how large your company is. MS is very aggressive in their volume licensing deals.
It is just a shame that drive enclosure does not use a fibre optic connection. I think it will be hard (if not impossible) to utilise the speed advantage of an 8 drive RAID array over GigE or Firewire 800.
I actually started a thread here awhile back asking if the Xserve could be used as a regular Mac Pro (provided my desk was big enough.) You know, with a cinema display sitting on top. MR's knowledgable Xserve users pointed out how LOUD they are...(I never got to mess around with one until a few weeks ago so I didn't know.) And yeah, even one lone Xserve puts out a fair amount of racket in a quiet room.
The dream I've been having involves a cluster of Mac Pros and a huge, multi-room Xserve farm.
Hey - we all have dreams, right?
At least now I don't feel so naive. Though, it did seem like a cool idea. Maybe there is something to the form factor for a desktop. If it was quite enough, and under-desk mounted, it could really work. Minimalist and out of sight, yet as functional as a MacPro...
Aggressive enough to give a company an unlimited client license for £616? That is the price of OS X Server.
What are you talking about? If you have web servers doing a lot of swapping you need to add more RAM or you need to distribute your servers.
The real place where swapping can become an issue is on the database servers. I'm busy moving over an application now to a new machine that has 64GB of RAM in it.
No, but you have to factor in 'switching' costs. Sure 616 is cheap for the server licensing, but then how much does it costs to move all your development from MSSQL to something else? All of our .net projects to something else? How about true hardware costs? We used to have volume deals with dell and now with HP. There are a lot more costs involved in the TCO than just the up front cost of licensing.
That's the situation many companies are in. I've done the math every time we replace or buy new server(s) to see if it adds up to switch. And truthfully, to me switching from Windows to OSX on the server side does not make any sense. If you're going to switch you make the switch to Linux (or BSD). That way you can still use any hardware you want and get the cheap licensing. Keep in mind I'm only talking about servers and not user desktops.
A good Xserve set up would be 2 x 2.26Ghz Quad Xeons
128GB SSD Boot drive
3 x 1TB ADMs with the hardware RAID card
Dual PSUs
Comes to about £4639
Have a look at Dell's website, the equivalent server specification-wise is the
Poweredge R610
with 3 x 300GB SAS RAIDed drives and Windows 2008 25 CAL server
comes to roughly £7500
I know which one I'd prefer! And negotiating Dell's server configuration page is... challenging.
128GB SSD Boot drive
3 x 1TB ADMs with the hardware RAID card
Dual PSUs
Comes to about £4639
Have a look at Dell's website, the equivalent server specification-wise is the
Poweredge R610
with 3 x 300GB SAS RAIDed drives and Windows 2008 25 CAL server
comes to roughly £7500
I know which one I'd prefer! And negotiating Dell's server configuration page is... challenging.
Something doesn't add up. 12 DIMM slots. Their tech page states "System supports up to 32GB in Mac OS X Server v10.5". 12 x 4Gb is 48GB. Either they made a typo or Leopard has a 32GB limit. I'm confident that Snow Leopard will address this but this makes for unusual memory placement. Perhaps with Sneopard we'll see this limit be raised to 96GB and the Mac pro limit accordingly (64GB).
*loud*
Quiet operation is not a requirement for a server room system.
It has to move a lot of air through the system, and the fans have to be small and spin fast.
You wouldn't want a 1U server at your desk!
Quiet operation is not a requirement for a server room system.
It has to move a lot of air through the system, and the fans have to be small and spin fast.
You wouldn't want a 1U server at your desk!
True I don't disagree I was just making the point that Apple are pretty competitive in the server world.
Porting software is always going to be a problem, but when you take into account the long term saving and access to open technology such as PostgreSQL or MySQL and the associated licensing savings there as well it does make sense over say a 5 year transition period.
But as you say, you would probably be better off moving to Solaris, OpenBSD or FreeBSD if you were making the full switch to Unix.
DisplayPort only
No VGA and no DVI unless you get an adapter. Every server room I've ever been to has a spare LCD lying around for quick local maintenance. Now you would need to carry an adapter around with you all the time.
I'm all for switching to the latest and greatest standard but in this case it's just going to be damned impractical.
No VGA and no DVI unless you get an adapter. Every server room I've ever been to has a spare LCD lying around for quick local maintenance. Now you would need to carry an adapter around with you all the time.
I'm all for switching to the latest and greatest standard but in this case it's just going to be damned impractical.
Emm what the heck is the amount of RAM to do with it supporting SAS. Totally contextless to quote my statement of SAS support as having anything what so ever to do with the amount of RAM or anything else as my comment only covered SAS support.
Yeah I noticed that as well. The kicker being it isn't even included, so you basically have to buy it if you want to use it in any server farm (as no one makes KVM that uses DP). As far as I can tell it doesn't appear that DVI is even that popular in the server space yet either.
I've installed loads of xserves, thanks to Apple's remote management tools I very rarely need to connect a monitor, can be installed, configured and monitored from my MacBook Pro.
(do keep a mini-dvi just in case though!)