Apple Xserve

For a non-Apple IT department, the Xserve will be a struggle to justify. The design, the quality of materials, the construction and so on have made for a premium price server, and you really can get much cheaper, and lighter, comparable servers from traditional x86 vendors. However few will be able to match the Xserve for build quality, attention to detail or reliability. If your data centre or server room is one that goes through frequent hardware refreshes, then an Xserve is probably not for you or your IT budget. For the smaller user, one who will likely buy just one Xserve, or at most a few, or for the large environment that will buy rack-mounted servers for a long-term deployment, such as healthcare, education, research and storage, then the Xserve is a very serious contender and a genuine alternative to the generic x86 1U rack server.

Latest Apple Xserve Review

Verdict

The Xserve is far from cheap, in fact it rates among the most expensive 1U rack servers on the market when compared with its Windows-based x86 counterparts. However, few servers on the market at any price can offer the same combination of build quality, performance, backward hardware compatibility and ease of deployment.

Two 64-bit 2.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors

1.33GHz frontside bus and 4MB shared L2 cache per processor

1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM)

80GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard drive

Built-in ATI Radeon X1300 graphics with 64MB RAM

Mac OS X Server 10.4 Unlimited-Client Edition

Eight fully buffered DIMM slots

Two PCI Express expansion slots

Three hard drive bays with support for SATA or SAS Apple Drive Modules

One optical drive

Two USB 2.0 ports

Two FireWire 800 ports

One FireWire 400 port

Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports

One DB9 serial port

One 650W port supply with support for dual redundant power supplies

Rack mounting rails

Integrated lights-out management hardware with Server Monitor software