Apple's first serious foray into the server world definitely have some controversial design decisions. The impact of these will be determined once these units get into the field. From a price standpoint, the Xserve shows up reasonably close to its Intel brethren, and in many cases surpasses the cost effectiveness of the Intel machines. From a performance standpoint, the Xserve should certainly be able to holds its own in many cases, and if Apple's statements are verified, it even will surpass the performance of these Intel based servers on all the major tests. The Xserve can easily be a contender in the low end, low profile server market.
More important than this, is some of the technology which Apple is showing off in the Xserve product. Finally, Apple is up to speed with their internal bus speeds. This could cause a large increase in the performance of the upcoming workstations, even without an increase in the clock speed of the G4. Couple the new memory bus with faster G4's, or next generation PowerPC chips that may be on their way along with MacOS X 10.2, and Apple could pose a serious challenge to high end Intel workstations.
Outside the reality distortion field, these machines offer the potential for a decently valued, comparably powered server for the standard low-end server market. On top of that, they also look neat!
Update, 22 May 2002:
At the time of the article writing, the prices for the mid-range and high-end Compaq servers were pulled from the 3-pack option, not the standard options. While these new prices are still on the high side of the sampled platforms, they are no longer a factor of two higher. So, the new price range for the Compaq's on the mid range server are $4077-4852, and on the high end $6420-8200. That doesn't change the final conclusions however.
About the Author
Hank Grabowski is a self admitted geek who finds a lot of thrills in working with and studying cutting edge computer and science concepts. He currently works as a
programmer and aerospace engineer for Analytical Graphics, makers of the satellite mission analysis software Satellite Tool Kit (STK), where he's been employed for 2.5 years. Previous to that he did his graduate work in
aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech. The biggest highlight of his life so far was working at CNN for the live Mir reentry coverage--which included air time as a bonus. His current computer hobbies include working with
alternative operating systems, and studying parallel processing and vector processing for scientific algorithms. Hank can be reached at hgrabowski@stk.com.
