After a long period of no updates, Apple has finally updated its often overlooked line of server hardware, the Xserve. The last update was in January 2008, which added the Xeon “Harpertown” processor, and this latest update introduces – as expected – Intel’s Nehalem processors, as well as a host of other upgrades and new options.
The press release neatly summarises most of the important changes:
Using Intel “Nehalem†Xeon processors and a next generation system architecture, the 1U rack-optimized Xserve delivers up to an 89 percent improvement in performance per watt. Xserve is available with up to two 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon processors and industry-leading storage options that include a low-power solid state drive (SSD) and up to 3TB of internal storage. Starting at $2,999, Xserve includes an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.
The new Xserve is available starting today, at the mentioned price of USD 2999. Note that Mac OS X Leopard only supports up to 32GB of memory, while the technical limits of the new Xserve allows for 96GB of RAM. Snow Leopard will most likely solve this issue, but it is something to take note of if you’re planning some serious virtualisation workloads.
Bad link
a heref=”http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/07/apple_nehalem_xserve/
Did anyone else notice this?
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/snowleopard/
also why 2 PCIe x16 slots and no x8 or x4? Don’t get my wrong I am thrilled that one of the 2 x16 slots is full length and this could be turned intot he most awsome gaming machine ever (if the windows drivers are good, does boot camp even work with Mac servers?).
You’re going to buy one of these, then use it for a gaming box?
Er…..okay.
no, that would just be plain stupid. I just like the idea that it’s possible. Who hasn’t envisioned an ultra powerfull rack (or tower) uber server with RAID configured SAS (or now SSD) hard drives and enough pure power and networking capabilities to host your own MMORPG server while playing the game at the same time.
Though this would lead to a much bigger problem of hundreds of 13 year olds with parents that have a lot of money and no common sense going, “OMG WTF BBQ (now sure why teh BBQ, but just hear me out). I can play my 10 WoW accounts at once! This is great as I don’t have any friends and its hard to find a party to do the raids I want!!1 w00t! 10 man Kara run here I come! ….I wish i had real friends ;-(”
/start rant
we live in a world of falsely believed entitlement where parents have become to hands off and choose to blame anything they can when they failed to realize their kid was building 8 pipe bombs in the garage, or shoots someone over an Xbox ( http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t671264.html one of hundreds of stories like this). “And so I ask you this one question. Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?” -Bender
/end rant
um, you can just build a machine with those specs and more. It isn’t hard.
I don’t think bootcamp works with servers…
The fact they didn’t put two full x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots in the new Mac Pro is the real head scratcher. Were they afraid to have to deal with the impending, SLI ready question?
COMMA SP-SP-SP-SPLICE!
Edited 2009-04-07 23:20 UTC
…?
There’s no comma splice in his comment…
“Were they afraid to have to deal with the impending, SLI ready question?”
that comma is unneeded.
“Were they afraid to have to deal with the impending `SLI ready’ question?
Yes, but it’s not a comma splice.
ah, you’re right. My bad.
I know that you favour OSX and Linux, but there is almost no software whatsoefer (old spelling just to make sure you get it) compatible with SLI platforms like OSX and Linux yet. Apple might do something about that, or atleast make an SLI OpenGL compatible driver. The main reasons i alwasy distrust apple in grapichs is that they ALWAYS put in a first class 2d chip that we know is awsome at the time. But even if they put in a voodoo5 in 1998, Theyll “F**K up” and end up with rage2 speeds and functionality. Even though they have fixed the speeds for the most part in recent releases, but the features lack in many areas. Even projects without NDA’s seems to do better.
A priv chat would probably be enligthening for me.
Edited 2009-04-08 00:10 UTC
SLI support is needed at the driver level, not the application layer. Linux nvidia drivers have full SLI support and yes it works in linux.
There’s a similar page for the “standard” version of Snow Leopard:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
“The Xserve is the best workgroup server for our education, business and creative customers,†said David Moody, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing.
Workgroup management, that’s what they are for. I never knew before. Good to know.
Well, its just that Apple’s marketing can be so enthusiastically hyperbolic to market their products as a solution to all problems that it sometimes hard to figure out where it actually makes sense to use them. But from that statement its pretty clear, they aren’t making the absurd claim that it would be an ideal high load web-server or database machine.
I swear they used to make that claim at some point. Or maybe that was just an over eager blogger. Plus the whole Virgina tech Super computer thing. I’m pretty sure using Apple’s computers is no longer the most cost effective to create a top 500 supercomputer. I swear, its almost impossible to refute absurd claims because by the time they are beyond absurd, every one has already forgotten the absurd claim.
That 16x PCIe slot ain’t about gaming, its about accelerating GPGPU workloads and OpenCL. Its not well suited to many things, but for the things it is, its going to fly. I can imagine pixar having a huge rack of these things equiped with as much RAM as it’ll take, some huge RAIDed disks, and a top-of-the-line Graphics board (or those GPU-based compute boards)… in fact, I’m kind of surprised they don’t support 2 in tandem mode.
I think the interesting part will be what Snow Leopard will be like on this server; I’ve administrated 3 Mac servers running 10.4.11 in the past and it was ok but I found that on occasions the wheels can fall off and its difficult to work out what has gone wrong. Also it would be nice for Apple to create a integrated way of managing printing quota’s instead of using PaperCut which is a horrible piece of software to setup (or has this been added to 10.5.x/10.6.x already?).
Just as a side issue; I found that SMB is a bit on the unreliable when it comes to Windows clients interacting with the server so a hint for users in a heterogeneous environment – iFolder does a pretty good job given it is just a matter of installing the iFolder client on Windows, Linux and Mac client computers and the experience is pretty good so far. Maybe Apple can have a look at eventually putting iFolder out there as the grand unifying protocol that is devoid of problematic reliability between Mac and Windows clients.