Apple Attacks Server Market
Apple Attacks Server Market
August 9th, 2006: Apple Computer's relationship with chipmaker, Intel, is bearing more than desktop fruit with the recent announcement of hardware additions and software upgrades to its servers.
Apple's new 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon-based Xserve servers were announced at its World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, yesterday. Joining the new hardware is a redesigned version of its OS X Server operating system based on its Leopard system.
In what is being widely viewed as an attack at Microsoft and its Longhorn/Vista operating systems, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs presented Leopard but did not demonstrate all of the enhancements that his company is claiming for it. His reasoning was that he did not want, "our friends to have to start their photocopiers any sooner than they have to".
Away from the soft combat, the actual hardware is a 1U unit with up to 2.2TB of storage. The big news, of course, is the Intel-based heart; it features two 64-bit, dual-core Xeon processors running at up to 3GHz. It also offers PCI Express, independent 1.33GHz front side buses with 4Mb of shared L2 cache and fully-buffered DIMMs.
Supporting up to 32GB of 667MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory, this gives the new Xserver twice the capacity and three times the bandwidth of the Xserve G5. Two eight-lane PCI Express expansion slots provide up to 2GB/s of throughput per slot.
Onboard Storage of up to 2.25TB is provided by three 3Gb, hot-pluggable SATA or SAS drives. And much to the apparent delight of the conference attendees, this Apple server now has redundant power supplies.
And in order to attack what has been traditionally weak market for the company, Apple is not apparently targeting its Server at everybody, "We've designed these machines so they will run just as well in a data centre as they will in someone's closet. Our users range from organisations that use the Xserve in mission critical environments to schools and individuals. They all tend to use it in different ways," was the pitch from senior director of server and storage hardware product marketing Alex Grossman.
While a range from data centre to closet is obviously spreading the net extremely widely, Apple feels that the fact that its operating system ships with an install system that matches environment to use will cut confusion and encourage take-up. Effectively, when setting up the Xserver, the user's requirements define what software elements they are able to see. This might not sound like a huge deal to Linux or even Windows users, but it is an advance for Apple.