Apple Xserve

When Apple switched its Xserve server product to Intel chips, it marked the completion of a surprisingly painless migration from PowerPC to x86.

However, having a proper Intel-based server in its product range also presents businesses - Mac users and non-Mac users - with a dilemma over whether to upgrade or deploy Apple's powerful new 1U rack server.

On first looks you will be hard pressed to see any exterior difference between the Intel Xserve and its PowerPC predecessor. Apple has retained the same chassis in order to get its first Intel-based rack server to market in the shortest amount of time possible (and no doubt keeping development costs as low as possible), thus retaining the familiar combination of three drive caddies and two enormous air intakes at the front of the unit, along with a large array of LEDs to indicate drive and server status, a slot-loading optical drive - Combo drive as standard or a SuperDrive as a factory fitted option - a single FireWire 400 port and two large thumb screws to hold it in place in the rack.

Remove the lid and it's a different story, with a brand new motherboard, new cooling fan system and support for the latest SATA II, or as an option SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drives, dual 8x PCI-Express slots, eight DDR-2 memory sockets with support for 32GB RAM and the all-important dual-core processors. The basic configuration we have looked at here features two 2GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors with 4MB shared L2 cache and 1.33GHz frontside bus per processor, effectively making this a quad processor 64-bit server. If this is not enough, you can opt for the even more powerful 2.66GHz or 3GHz versions of the processor. The Xserve comes supplied with an Intel-version of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server, which includes the familiar set of easy-to-configure server functions and applications including web and blog server, iChat server, Windows Active Directory support and mail server. At the time of writing, no technology guarantee has been announced with regard to the forthcoming Mac OS X10.5 Leopard Server release, expected towards the end of this year.

The new Xserve also offers a significant performance boost compared to the previous G5-based model, with SPEC benchmarks for the 3Ghz Xeon configuration ranging from three to five times faster than a dual 2.3GHz G5.

Retaining the same chassis design has produced one major benefit for existing PowerPC Xserve and Xserve RAID users - the drive caddies are interchangeable between them and the new Intel-based version. SATA II is backward compatible with SATA I and Apple has retained the same caddy connector, meaning any existing investment in drives will not go to waste. Due to the proprietary nature of both the internal and external drive connections, Apple continues to only sell caddies pre-populated with custom-made drives. The base Xserve comes with one 80GB 7200-rpm SATA drive and two empty bays. Fully-populated, the three bays can hold a total of 2.25TB of storage.

A welcome addition is the inclusion of a basic graphics card. Previous models were designed to be installed and used headless (no monitor, keyboard or mouse), so if you actually needed to connect to one to perform configuration or other tasks, you had to use the serial port on Ethernet ports on the rear, along with unfriendly terminal-based apps such as Telnet, or Apple's Remote Desktop client. This was fine, but only when the server was actually working properly. The inclusion of a basic 64MB ATI Radeon X1300 PCI Express graphics card now means you can connect a monitor (as well as USB keyboard and mouse) directly to the Xserve, simplifying the process of diagnosing and correcting faults, performing software installations and OS reinstalls and performing initial hard drive partitioning.