Apple today announced that it has begun shipping the company’s first rackmount server, the Xserve. Introduced in May, Apple said they have received over 4,000 orders for the product to date.
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“We introduced Xserve only a few weeks ago, and we’ve already received orders for over 4,000 of them,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president, Worldwide Product Marketing. “Xserve’s G4 processing power, massive storage, incredible I/O performance and Mac OS X Server software with unlimited-client licenses are making it a hit with customers who want an affordable, powerful 1U rack-mount server.”
According to Apple, industry standard test shows the Xserve out-performed similarly configured severs from Dell, IBM and Sun. As measured side-by-side in web serving, BLAST implementation and disk performance, Xserve outperforms its competitors in the following ways:
“This data goes a long way in giving Apple credibility as a server vendor,” Tim Deal, an analyst with Technology Business Research told MacCentral. “There is going to be some apprehension from people in adopting the Xserve — seeing data like this will help give Apple the credibility that it needs.”
When the Xserve was first announced many people were surprised with Apple’s decision to install ATA drives instead of the SCSI implementation normally found in industrial strength servers. Some thought the lower disk performance would be enough to keep people from buying the product, but the benchmarks seem to indicate that Apple may have made the correct decision.
“We knew the disk performance would be better, but everyone asked whether we were sure ATA would better than SCSI — the numbers proved to be fantastic,” said Alex Grossman Apple’s Director of Server and Storage Marketing.
Xserve is available immediately through the Apple Store and through Apple Authorized Resellers.