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Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology

Apple Updates Xserve, Announces Xserve RAID 404

Posted by pudge from the bring-it-on dept.
jht writes "This morning Apple introduced an updated Xserve and the long-awaited Xserve RAID. The relevant specs for new Xserve: single or dual G4/1.33, upgraded DDR 333 RAM, and FireWire 800 all added, with pricing between $2799 and $8248 for stock configs. The Xserve RAID specs: shipping in configs of 720GB for $5999, 1.26TB for $7499, or 2.52TB for $10999. It uses up to 14 180GB drive modules (each on a separate ATA/100 channel), and a pair of Fibre Channel interfaces to connect them to the Xserve."
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Apple Updates Xserve, Announces Xserve RAID More

Apple Updates Xserve, Announces Xserve RAID

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  • Finally reduce the cost of software raid on MAC Platforms.

  • another use (Score:4, Funny)

    by b17bmbr ( 608864 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:38AM (#5270691)
    wouldn't this be a great xserver for thin x clients? just a thought. and no i don't intend it to be funny.

    • Re:another use (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, due to the warped nature of the X protocol, this would make a good X client server. The thing you have on your desk is an X server client. That is, it's an X server which is a client of the client server which serves the clients to the X servers. Got it?

  • Took freakin long enough... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DAQ42 ( 210845 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:39AM (#5270694)
    Finally they release this thing. I've been waiting for this hardware since last MWNY. But anyway. Have you taken a look at the pricing for the 2GB PCI Fibre cards they're selling? $500. Good god that is cheap. I haven't seen a decent fibre card for less than $1500 (retail). Must have this hardware (actually, I will once it ships). Yay for me. More fibre stuff.
    Client : I want something really big, and really fast, and really cheap.
    Me : Then you don't want anything from these guys (M$).
    • Is this hardware platform only cheaper vs the licensing costs you will have with MS? The hardware itself for the servers / storage seems really expensive too me, but does it balance out with the per seat licensing costs included?

  • ATA RAID (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ERJ ( 600451 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:40AM (#5270703)
    Does it seem ironic to anyone else that the original main supporter of scsi is now doing ATA software raid in their high end server products?

    • Re:ATA RAID (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ahknight ( 128958 )
      Does it seem more ironic that they're making more money by doing so? [g]

    • Re:ATA RAID (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hcdejong ( 561314 )

      It's good to see Apple being pragmatic about this. If IDE offers sufficient performance (and it should, given that each drive has its own IDE controller), then why not use it?

      OK, so you can buy SCSI drives that are faster due to higher rpm. But can you build a 2.5 Tb system with SCSI that outperforms an Xserve RAID?

      • The ATA should be more than enough for most people, especially given the 2.16TB with RAID 5 redundancy. With the independant channels, the speed should not be lacking, and the lower cost of replacing IDE drives when they fail is a welcome addition to an IT manager's analysis to the boss.

        Hey, maybe I'm crazy, and I just like all the lights on the front. :)
        • They are claiming just over 200MB/sec with 14 drives which is impressive - granted this is probably RAID 0, but still, most of these FC to IDE boxen rate around 160MB.

    • Re:ATA RAID (Score:5, Insightful)

      by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:57AM (#5270849)
      Well if you're refering to the general switch from scsi to ide, then not really. Apple adopted scsi wwwwaaay back before ide even existed. Back then there was scsi or mfm/rll. And mfm/rll only offered internal hard drive storage, no scanners, no external drives. So the original adoption of scsi made complete sense back then. Apples continued use of scsi made sense for almost exactly the same reasons. Many people had things like scanners and external hd's (dtp, video, etc), so a move to ide wouldn't have made sense even if it would have resulted in a somewhat cheaper disk subsystem, since they'd most likely would have to have shipped scsi anyway.

      Now fast forward, things like usb and firewire take care of things like scanners and other higher speed peripherals, the the internal disk bus can be just that. So all of a sudden ide makes sense. And then in terms of performance, ide has definitely caught up and it would be hard to make an argument for scsi from a strictly price/performance standpoint.

      So, while a curiousity, it not all that ironic, just a sign of the times.

      • Re:ATA RAID (Score:5, Interesting)

        by LoudMusic ( 199347 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:26AM (#5271097)
        And actually, Apple produced a few desktops along the way that had IDE disks in them. Here is an example [apple-history.com], though it doesn't seem to be mentioned on that site. I had about four or five of these things here at work.

        They also began using IDE CD-Rom drives quite frequently. I assume the price break was too much to pass up. I have quite a few older Macs here that have both IDE and SCSI controllers on the motherboard.

        Additionally, when they had gone full IDE just a few years ago they were still including the option for a SCSI card and SCSI hard drives. I noticed recently (last revision?) that the G4 PowerMac no longer includes the option for SCSI hard drives, though a controller card is still available.

      • Re:IDE Q (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MacAndrew ( 463832 )
        I'm a longtime Mac user who was envious of IDE HD drives for years, then Apple abruptly switched. IRC there are certainly advantage to a SCSI HD, but omitting the on-drive controller saves $$$.

        When Apple first promoted SCSI, it was a very novel deal. PC's lagged considerably, esp. when you could get a Mac with serial (Appletalk) and SCSI built-in. Once they had SCSI, I guess was cheaper to string the hard drive into rather than add IDE? I kinda wished they jammed a parallel port and RS-232 in there, too, but that's greedy.

        Also, why does IDE not do external devices?

        I'll note that SCSI was hardly ideal, esp. in its earliest form. The chain could onlt be very short, and ordering the devices plus termination were a bit of black magic to get it to work. God forbid you pull a cable with the power on. Plus the SCSI cables were *expensive*.

        Does anyone else remember "analysts" making fun of Apple for going to USB and Firewire?

        • Re:IDE Q (Score:4, Informative)

          by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:42AM (#5271208)
          Also, why does IDE not do external devices

          I don't know all the reasons, but at least one is that the max length for an ide cable is like a foot and a half. Add to that the intervening connectors and I assume that the ide signal is not robust enough to survive such a rugged journey.

          God forbid you pull a cable with the power on. Plus the SCSI cables were *expensive*.

          Remember that hot pluggable peripherals is a realtively recent thing (at least affordable ones). Back then they were warning you not to unplug your parallel cables while computer/printer was on. And god forbid you unplugged your kb or mouse (this is all on a pc). Your right about the scsi cables, absolutely criminal the cost of those stupid things.

          Does anyone else remember "analysts" making fun of Apple for going to USB and Firewire?

          Remember, you can always spot the trailblazers, they're the ones with the arrows sticking out their backs ;)

        • I'm a longtime Mac user who was envious of IDE HD drives for years, then Apple abruptly switched. IRC there are certainly advantage to a SCSI HD, but omitting the on-drive controller saves $$$.

          IDE has an on-drive controller just like SCSI - that's why they called it IDE in the first place: Integrated Drive Electronics. Before IDE/ATA, you had to run a separate controller card in an ISA slot that kept track of the allocation of physical (not logical) sectors on the disks and positioned the read/write heads manually. Anyone remember SpinWrite? Norton's Disk Optimizer? LOW LEVEL FORMATS? **shudder**

          SCSI implements a much more sophisticated set of command, signaling and contention protocols than IDE, but they both feature a controller integrated into the drive.
    • No more so than the fact that the original main supporter of the Motorola 68000 is now doing PowerPC, or that the original main supporter of NuBus is now doing PCI, or that the original main supporter of Mac OS 9 is now doing Mac OS X.

      Times change. Apple hasn't shipped a SCSI hard drive in years.

  • Funny how the Xserve even looks good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:43AM (#5270727) Homepage
    It's stylish, despite the fact that most would have it sitting in a rack, in some datacenter, far from eyes. But it's still metalic, pretty, smooth, and clean.

    • Re:Funny how the Xserve even looks good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dirkx ( 540136 ) <dirkx@vangulik.org> on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:11AM (#5270959) Homepage
      Ma dai - who cares.. except for the fact as a proofpoint about it being well engineered - and that I care about. Feast for the eyes, feast for the hands: tool-less disassembly; the inner box slides out of its enclosure (forget those crappy folding'arm' things which always snip at your cables) - tool-less idiot proof swapping of most components. And virtually impossible to mount things upside down or otherwise wrong. That is where the good looks come in.

      Good Design - a joy to work with ;-)

      And somehow that translates in a better bottom line for the buyer.

  • More Blinkenlights! (Score:5, Funny)

    by hcdejong ( 561314 ) <hobbes@x m s n e t . nl> on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:47AM (#5270758)

    ...on the Xerve RAID. Good to see Apple continues to include such essentials.

  • Xserve experiences good and bad (Score:4, Interesting)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:52AM (#5270806)
    two words: raid 5. its missing from apple. You can buy a third party raid 5 however.

    A while ago I bought two xserves to act as diskserves to a linux cluster and to backup my desktop macs. I bought these machines because I felt they were a good deal. I got bids on several pc based linux disk servers, as well as several NAS boxes. I was comparing 480GB machines. a high quality generic brand (supermicro) with scsi disks and dual Gigabit ran about $8000 (at the time). The lowest bid I got was $5000 but the unknown quality and reputation of the vendor was not satisfactory. The mac xserves ran just under $7000 using IDE disks with 4 indepenedent masters (out performs the scsi). Additionally the mac had other nice features such as: 1U versus 3U. hot swap. advanced admin tools.


    I bought both the apple and supermicro based systems in the end and can compare them directly. . after I unpacked the mac I was even more impressed with the high quality construction and ease of access to the interior in comparison.

    first the good news:

    What really made it for me on the macs was the fact that I had to hire a sysadmin to correctly set up my linux box with load balancing, Ldap, mail server, and moreover to keep it patched and to monitor it. On the macs I set them up myself. No detected problems with load balance. and the mac tools let you set up nearly all the services you might want with an intuitive gui.

    Actually, I had a few snags but even here I have to give apple a good reprot card. they chancged how they did network admin right when I got my box. so all the documentation was for the obsolete tools and none for the new. So I got things really screwed up with services I could not turne off once turned on. The machines would gag when they could not find their ldap serviers or when they were cut off from the internet. But I called apple on the free service plan. after a ten minute wait on came a guy who really knew his stuff and spent about an hour with me getting all of my various problems sorted out and teaching me the new system. And in fact the next day he called me back! said he had another idea about a question i had asked him. I was really impressed on the customer service. its much better than for my other mac computers. Since then Ive had mac people call me back three times with ideas for me. Now that the new tools are better docuimented (still a few gaps), life is easy.

    perhaps the best feature is the software update feature. I get patches and new tools delivered automatically and have the confiudence they wont screw up my all apple configuration. thus I still have not needed a sys admin. At the purchase time I had considered some NAS boxes (e.g. iomega,snap...) for the purpose of making sys admin simple. But these things have lousy throughput for the price and aren't versatile computing machines.

    Now the bad news:

    However I have had three problems with my xesrves that I dont have with my linux box.

    first no raid 5. that's absouluetly maddening. I bought a raid 5 solution from a third party but I'm nervous it wont be effieicnt or it will die someday when I do a self-update that makes it incompatible.

    second, and this compounds the above problem is the UFS/HFS+ dichotomy. while macs do run UFS, they dont do it effieicently or with any advanced features like journalling. Moreover the OS and some mac apps wont work unless they are on UFS. so you always have to have a HFS+ partition. but wait! you cant partition a raid disk with different file systems (on apple) so this means if you want to have any hfs raid the whole disk has to be HFS+. on our four disk Xserve this means I ended up with two disks RAID1 HFS+ and and two disks UFS raid 1- a whopping 120GB of UFS out of my 480GB (raw) can be UFS. yuck!. fortunately there is now a partionalble raid 5 soultion from a theird party which fixes this issue. (the reason I wanted UFS, was because even though I lost some effieiceny i wanted no surprises for my linux systems due to the filenaming case sensitivity)

    The third problem I have had is that while the admin tools are wonderful and run on remote machines, there are a few tools and apps that will not run remotely. for example, if I want to use the GUI software update remotely, I cant. I have to use the terminal CLI tool. This is not too bad, but its just an example. if you use other gui tools, like brickhouse firewall or whatever, you have to go to the terminal attactched to the machine.

    My work around for this is to use OSXVNC which does the job. However there is a catch I dont like. You cant use osxvnc on a headless mac. that is you have to have a display device connected to the mac to use osxvnc!! there's no way I want to have a display for each mac xserve. Of course I could use a KVM switch but my preference would be that it should be unneccessary for remote admin. my work around here is that I can fool the macs by briefly connecting a display to them after boot. I can then unplug the display and OSXVNC will still work on my headless mac.

    My conclusion is that apple has a wonderfulhigh quality machine. And it will work perfectly for you if you dont require UFS or remote admin of GUI based apps. When I bought my system I had just had a bad experience with 20 athalon servers that had died from heat delamination of the fans and were unstable due to current glithces from the cd roms. I was thus very risk averse. when I bought the apples I knew I was buying peace of mind, and not paying extra for it. I had no idea what good customer service I was going to get. PLus I did not realize I could also buy a complete replacement part kit (down to the motherboard) to have locally. Since my experience with their customer service I bought the extened warantee. its lot cheaper than a sys admin.

    when mac comes out with native raid5 and someone writes a VNC that can run headless all will be well.

    p.s. I apologize to the few slashdotters who are outraged when a post is reposted. this review was posted as a sub comment to a sub topic on an earlier artilce today. rightfully it belonged in this thread so I reposted it here.

    • NOW WITH RAID 5 (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:03AM (#5270893)
      Woohoo. I have to eat my own words posted above. I just finished looking over the detailed specs in the apples pdf file and it turns out that the new RAID box has raid 5. this is great news. I wonder if they will retrofit the old 1-U xesrves to raid 5? or is the a feature of the new hardware raid controller?

      any how I was mistaken--the apple web page did not mention the raid 5 so I assumed it was just the same as the old 1-U xserve. sorrty for the misinfomation

      • journaling! it requires activation, but is there...
    • I personally like the Dell NAS. Aside from the Apple spacific hardware, the Dell 725N is comparable to the Apple XServe (or at least the old model) and was $1,700 cheaper.

      Mine has a 900mhz P3 with 512mb of RAM. "Why would you put that in a NAS?" you ask? Because I had the money (: And even at that it was still way cheaper than the Apple. The reason I was even considering the Apple is because my NAS serves 25 Macintosh workstations - and the Dell NAS running Windows 2000 with Services for Macintosh does a pretty nice job. I can do complete remote management either through snapins or using Terminal Server which is free for admin use. It also has a web management console, though I don't use it because I prefer to use a Terminal session.

      And it's basic X86 hardware. You could install Linux on it and have a Linux server serving your Linux cluster. Amazing! You could even yank the drives that it comes with and throw in 250GB Maxtor disks to get up to nearly 3/4 of a terabyte at RAID 5 ... in modern UFS! (:

  • 640MB (Score:3, Funny)

    by Finitistic ( 29532 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:54AM (#5270819) Homepage
    A gripe I have with the memory is that it comes with 128 MB built-in and 128 MB on the memory placeholder, by default. I don't get that. Why didn't they include that 256 MB as built-in so it could free up the memory placeholder for the user to add a 512 module and go up to 768 MB of max RAM? The way it is now, the max is at 640 MB...

    Well, 640MB ought to be enough for anybody.

  • X overload (Score:5, Funny)

    by njord ( 548740 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @10:54AM (#5270820)

    Well, I think it's official now; the letter X has been overused. First, we had X11 and all the things named after that, then Window XP and OS X. Now Xserve?

    I think we all know where this is headed - it's going to be like the South Park where they say 'shit' 162 times and the Knight of Standards and Practices are going to come and kick us around for overusing the letter. Again, real-like imitates South Park

    Njord

    The letter X was made to vex - Edward Gorey

    • Re:X overload (Score:5, Funny)

      by entrylevel ( 559061 ) <jaundoh@yahoo.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:37AM (#5271162)
      I agree the letter X is overutilized, but Apple could have done much worse. For example, they could have called it the "iRaq".
    • Just wait until the e-commerce enhanced version... Then it will be the:

      eXserve

      Add (more) internet functionality:

      e-iXserve

      And why don't we add in a Version number, after all it's a different version!

      e-iXserve 2.0

      And then we should probably denote how many processors it has:

      e-iXserve 2.0 Single Processor
      e-iXserve 2.0 Dual Processor

      But wait! Don't forget if you order the Custom built "Ultimate" version:

      e-iXserve 2.0 Custom Ultimate Edition

      Isn't that better?

      PS. These systems look great- I wouldn't mind one.
    • Well, I think it's official now; the letter X has been overused. First, we had X11 and all the things named after that, then Window XP and OS X. Now Xserve?

      well, just wait until the next major version of Max OS, or OS/XI. Then you could have XIServe and XIRaid.

      Of course in a few decades there's going to be the problem of what to call OS/XXX. Maybe by then the porn industry will own the world, and this might work in Apple's favor..

  • Serial Ports? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperQ ( 431 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:02AM (#5270885) Homepage
    Is it just me, or are there a DB-9 serial ports on the controlers.. I thought Apple considered RS-232 legacy and obsolete?

    I work on a ProFibre DF4000 system.. and the serial port is the best way to configure the system. The *gak* windows based in-band management software is crap.

    The only other thing I wonder is how 7200RPM ide drives benchmark against my 10kRPM FCAL disks.

    • Re:Serial Ports? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by k_187 ( 61692 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:10AM (#5270958) Journal
      The only other thing I wonder is how 7200RPM ide drives benchmark against my 10kRPM FCAL disks.

      Well, your 10K disks would probably smoke these since they're only 7200 and on ATA/100. however, how much would 2.5 terrabytes cost in those 10K SCSI drives? That's what's incredible about this I think. for just over 10K you can get that much storage.

      And yes there are DB-9 serial ports on tehre. they're on the Xserve servers as well. The X-line is apple's better than their previous half-assed attempts at making a real mac server(which previously were just desktop macs with extra ethernet ports).
      • You mean like the Network Server 500 and 700? Those were kickass *Nix boxes, unlike the +50 servers (8550, 9650 et al) which were desktops with different software packages (They came with AppleShare and later AppleShare IP).

        The xServe is a logical successor to the Network Server line. Oh, and you might be shocked at the benchmarks for those 7200RPM IDE drives, they won't match your 10k or 15k SCSI drives, but they'll come closer than you would think.

    • Is it just me, or are there a DB-9 serial ports on the controlers.. I thought Apple considered RS-232 legacy and obsolete?

      The Fibre Channel protocol can run over both optic fibre and copper. Those DB-9s may well be for the Fibre Channel-over-copper support they cite.

      Like SCSI, Fibre Channel comprises a protocol and some physical layer specs. In many cases, when you use Fibre Channel to connect to storage, the protocol that rides on top of Fibre Channel is: SCSI!

    • Re:Serial Ports? (Score:3, Informative)

      by TClevenger ( 252206 )
      Is it just me, or are there a DB-9 serial ports on the controlers.. I thought Apple considered RS-232 legacy and obsolete?

      The DB-9 connectors allow you to connect to the signaling ports on your UPSs.


  • Like, up to 14 I think? Oof. It looks like they hid the ATA/RAID muckety-muck behind (what amounts to) a dedicated-PC-in-a-cabinet like the folks at perifitech [perifitech.com] do it, so the server doesn't need to know anything about the nature or configuration of the arrays beyond the fiber-channel adapter driver.

    This leads me to some questions:

    1) Is this a STANDARD fiber-channel SCSI adapter?

    2) If so, is there any chance of using this cabinet on an x86 server?

  • Oh, great. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Takeel ( 155086 ) <v32gd4r02@sne a k e m ail.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:13AM (#5270975) Homepage Journal
    My office just received one of the 1GHz XServes on Friday. This new model is significantly better and $200 cheaper.

    I guess that's progress for you, but we can't help but feel screwed over.
    • I guess that's progress for you, but we can't help but feel screwed over.

      Why is that? This happens every day to people who've bought almost any kind of computer/electronic anything? I can understand feeling kinda bummed out over the timing, but that's a lot different than feeling "screwed over". Is Apple supposed to say, "Now watch out everybody, we're going to bump the hardware in about a month or so, so don't buy anything right now"? Or are you saying that Apple should always have new models be more expensive than old ones just to make recent purchasers of the older models not feel bad?

    • Re:Oh, great. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Znonymous Coward ( 615009 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:24AM (#5271068) Journal
      Apple has a 10-day return policy. You can return it and order a new one or keep this one and get a credit for the difference. Call the Apple store and talk with them about it.

      • The downside, of course, is that you'll have to return your Xserve now, and then place an order for a new one. Since the Apple Store web site is estimating a ship date of late March for the new machine, you'd be without a server for about six weeks at the absolute minimum.

        Life's just full of these little dilemmas, isn't it?
        • Fortunately, Apple's Policy will give you a price adjustment on your existing system. They should drop it down to at least the price of a new system, and probably a little below.

          That way you get to keep the existing server without feeling ripped off and use it during the 6 weeks you'd be waiting for a new one anyway.

    • "Should Apple reduce its price on any shipped product within 10 calendar days of shipment, you may contact Apple Sales Support at 1-800-676-2775 to request a refund or credit of the difference between the price you were charged and the current selling price. To receive the refund or credit you must contact Apple within 14 business days of shipment."

      from
      http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/s alespoli cies.html#Apple%20Prices

      -trout

  • I'd love to see true throughput specs on this with bonnie or similar. They claim 400MB/s with FC but I wonder if this is legit or vendor speak :)

    Anyone tested this thing before release? ANy true numbers?

    • OK - SO their performance chart shows just over 200MB/s with 14 drives in what I assume is RAID0. Shoudl be interesting to see if this holds up and what their RAID 5 write speeds are. 3ware's RAID-5 performance is scary fast on sequential writes which is good for large file (multi-media and research) handling. If this box is up there - I'd say its a winner.

      AND the admin client is Java based so you don't need an XServe to admin it!

  • I can't understand... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bob670 ( 645306 )
    why anyone would knock this? Apple has been taken to task for not having a server solution, so they answrered, and with a very usable product. Any compnay producing any hardware that helps people free themselves from MS is a good thing.

  • ATA/133 (Score:3, Informative)

    by benh57 ( 525452 ) <bhinesNO@SPAMalumni.ucsd.edu> on Monday February 10, 2003 @11:40AM (#5271184) Homepage
    The XServe RAID's "channels" (controllers) are ATA/133. However the larger drives are only ATA/100. The smaller apple drive modules are ATA/133.
    • As far as I understand it, there aren't any IDE drives out there that will saturate ATA/100 (and each drive has its own ATA/100 channel in this thing). Actually, I'm pretty sure that they can't even saturate ATA/66, except for burst transfers from cache.

      Most IDE drive manufacturers only claim ATA/100 for this reason. IBM, for example, does not make any ATA/133 drives. ATA/133 is "faster", but the drives can't keep up.

  • Is this really a cheap solution? I like apple stuff as much as the next obsessive (I can admit it :) but there's no hope in hell I could ever understand the high level above a personal workstation/computer.

    To me 2.52TB is like a gigabyte would have been in the mid 80s. Far beyond even thinking about. I'm curious how it really matches to comparable hardware that's already out there, with respect to drive space, redundability(!) and connectivity.
    • Is this really a cheap solution?

      Yes.

      Just a few months ago, last summer I think it was, I was looking for inexpensive RAID solutions that included Fibre Channel to the host and IDE on the back end. Performance wasn't an issue for us; capacity was, and reliability was somewhere in the middle of the importance stack. (Our customers were willing to accept occasional down-time, but were very price-sensitive.)

      I found a system from a company called Chapparal-- I have no idea if I spelled that right. This system used IDE drives, bridged inside the box to SCSI, which was in turn bridged outside the box to Fibre Channel. Performance sucked ass, and it didn't have redundant anything, but the price was right: $10,000 a TB.

      Now, just six months later, Apple-- a company known for higher-than-average prices-- is selling a technically superior and much better built box with twice the storage for roughly the same price.

      While I wouldn't classify this as a cheap solution-- it's too well built and has too many features to be called "cheap"-- it's definitely a good deal.
  • Just a little thing I noticed. i thought the xserve was identical, but its cdrom now seems to be a slot loader, rather than a laptop-style-tray as it was before.

    small things amuse... etc :)

  • Xserve as workstation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @12:21PM (#5271535)
    I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this yet. Apple has a little blurb on the Xserve page [apple.com], at the bottom on the right, that says,
    The workstation for digital video

    Thinking of using Xserve as a workstation for working with digital video? Good call: You can get a built-to-order unit from the Apple Store with an AGP 4X graphics card with 64MB of DDR video RAM installed in the AGP/PCI combo slot. Final Cut Pro and optional high-performance PCI cards for audio and real-time video editing complement the solution.
    That's new, isn't it? I remember that there was a lot of talk when Xserve first came out about using it as a workstation, and the consensus was that it wouldn't work very well because the graphics card didn't offer much. I guess Apple was listening. I can think of four post-production houses within ten miles of my house that would be interested in replacing some of the Final Cut systems with Xserves. Keep a couple of G4's around for doing audio and video I/O, but do all the creative work on rack systems in the main equipment room. Very cool.
    • I'm pretty sure Apple has offered this option since the beginning, but the consensus seems to be that the Xserve is too loud to make a good workstation.

    • Re:Xserve as workstation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:31PM (#5272174)
      Main equipment room? Why not just rack it with the decks and other sundry equipment in the edit suites? Less cabling, nicer look and probably a damnsight easier to work on than some of the kludgy tower setups I've seen, which usually result in a ton of recabling to do minor tweaks in the box.

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