We all know Apple Computer. It's that West Coast company holding on to a sliver of the desktop PC market pie, trying to convince everyone to see the light and leave their Wintel computers behind.
Apple's problem is that Wintel systems are essentially business machines while Apple computers, judging from the company's ads, have a liberal arts degree in Zen Buddhism. "All things will pass" may make it as a slogan in certain parts of California but, for the rest of the world, "All transactions must be processed now" remains the logo on the corporate IT flag. Adjust your pacemakers where applicable because apparently Apple's psychedelia has--at least in some quarters--been replaced by a sense of business.
Apple has recently started shipping a server. Rather than your average Mac box with a "This is a server" label, Apple's Xserve is a G4-powered (that's PowerPC for the uninitiated), rack-mounted, Mac OS X- (a Unix derivative) controlled, hell-bound for glory, purpose-built server. The full specs, straight from the Apple's core, run like this: Dual 1GHz PowerPC G4s, up to 2GB DDR SDRAM, two 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots (plus a third combination PCI/AGP slot), dual Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire and USB ports, and four Ultra ATA/100 Apple Drive Module bays.
Forty-two Xserve systems will fit in an industry standard 8-foot rack, providing up to 630 gigaflops of processing power from up to 84 processors. And there's room for about 20 terabytes of hot-pluggable storage to be installed in that 42U rack. Doesn't sound very Apple-like, does it? Sounds more like an HP or Dell product with a hint of IBM thrown in--although Apple is quick to point out that "Xserve is the industry's first 1U dual processor RISC server. Not even Sun or IBM offers such phenomenal processing power in such a small package." Perhaps all that laughter we heard when Apple declared its G4-based computer a "supercomputer" subject to Federal export interdiction seems a bit misplaced now. It gets better.
If you know nothing about Mac OS X, you might be interested to discover that the core of this OS is an open source product called Darwin. Perhaps this brings to mind visions of Linux, but fear not. A look through the history of Darwin shows that it arrived with Apple's acquisition of NeXT (of which the OS was possibly the only universally acclaimed part of that less than successful venture). While Darwin is at the core of OS X (along with BSD Unix), the front end is typical Apple user-friendly fare. The silly string that joins the two is unnoticeable.
The Xserve may look like just another way to escape from Windows (well, not exactly--it supports Mac, Windows, Unix, and Linux clients) but it's not a product in an isolation booth. Although it uses Macintosh-specific NetBoot, Macintosh Manager 2, and AFP home directories, it also supports cross-platform native file sharing, as well as Apache Web server, WebDAV server, POP and IMAP mail, FTP, QuickTime Streaming Server, DNS, and DHCP out of the box. Remote hardware monitoring--on a system-by-system basis or for all systems--is part of the package as well.
Considering the included management tools Xserve is priced competitively, but there's one other thing that may make your budget sing those folksy songs of the sixties: Xserve has an unlimited-client license--whether for tens or thousands of clients. These days, when Microsoft is considering a subscription plan for its desktop software, Apple's magnanimous licensing is almost more remarkable than Apple producing a competent server for the rest of us.
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