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Hands on: Apple's new Xserve

25.10.2006
I recently got a walk-through from Apple officials of the company's new Intel-based Xserve, and then -- again, courtesy of Apple -- I got to actually take one for a test drive. I can say from the start that this stylish piece of hardware represents a significant improvement over its predecessor, which itself offered amazing value and high-powered performance. Apple went to great pains to deliver design and performance improvements that are evident on first look and use and will be welcomed by data center managers.

Overview

The new Xserve base model sports two 64-bit dual-core Xeon "Woodcrest" processors running at 2.0 GHz; 1GB of 667-MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM; a single 80GB 3Gbit/sec. Serial ATA (SATA) Apple Drive Module; onboard dual Ethernet; a Combo drive; single power supply; no expansion cards; a built-in ATI Radeon X1300 PCI Express graphics card with 64MB of GDDR3 synchronous dynamic RAM; and Mac OS X Server unlimited client software. Base Price: US$2,999. That's quite a punch at such a low price.

The OS X server software included is a 100 percent native, 64-bit unified operating system with many of the included applications -- like MySQL and Java Application server -- also bumped up to take advantage of the 64-bit processors. As in previous versions, the Xserve motherboard is held in place by captive thumbscrews that require no special tools to open.

The model I tested is a bit more robust than the standard configuration, and I had it optimized for streaming media. This particular model has two dual-core Xeon processors running at 3.0 GHz; 8GB of RAM (4x2GB 667-MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMMs); a single 73GB, 15,000-rpm Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive, plus two 750GB 7200-rpm SATA drives; the built-in Radeon X1300 graphics card; dual power supplies; a dual-layer SuperDrive; a 2Gbit/sec. dual-channel Fibre Channel card; a dual-port Gigabit Ethernet card; and the Mac OS X Server unlimited client.

Pricing is still a bit lower than what you would expect for such a loaded machine, but it's not cheap: As equipped, the Xserve would cost $9,971.