Apple bolsters Xserve platform

Apple next month will offer the Mac business market much-anticipated hardware upgrades to its Xserve platform. Forthcoming will be a 2GHz dual-processor G5 server in a 1U form factor and Xserve RAID with 3.5TB of storage capacity.

Developers have been eagerly awaiting the G5 Xserve ever since the introduction of the original G4 Xserve and Xserve RAID last year.

“We would like to see a 1U rack unit with a G5. We’re salivating over the whole idea,” Steve Olson, technical director of engineering at Sybase, said in July 2003.

Olson and others got their wish last week when Apple unveiled the G5s.

“The performance of the G5 coupled with the additional storage capabilities provide the perfect one-two punch for our enterprise clients,” said Wiley Corbett, CEO of ProVAR, a value-added reseller to the content-creation industry.

The Xserve will be offered in single- and dual-2GHz-processor units, with as much as 8GB ECC (error-correcting code) memory and as much as 750GB of storage. The single-processor Xserve will be priced at $2,999, and the dual-processor unit priced at $3,999. A third model is optimized for clusters and is priced at $2,999.

With the greater Intel server market in mind, Apple also introduced an upgraded Xserve RAID storage system with support for Windows and Linux-based platforms.

The 3U rack-mounted system will have a maximum capacity of 3.5TB, and as much as 210MBps throughput for $10,999. The entry-level unit is priced at $5,999 with dual independent RAID controls with 128MB of cache per controller, dual 2GB Fibre Channel SFP (Small Form-factor Pluggable), 1TB of storage, and 8MB of on-drive cache.

It remains to be seen whether these more powerful system configurations can give Apple a solid boost in the larger enterprise market, according to one industry analyst.

“The big 2004 question for Apple is, Will they go full bore after recapturing some enterprise market share, and how will they do that?” said Peter Kastner, executive vice president of technology research at Aberdeen Group.

According to one Apple executive, the question is not relevant.

Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple, said the Xserve product line was created at the request of its current customers. Although saying that “opportunistic” sales to new customers are welcome, Rubinstein gave the impression that targeting the greater enterprise is not part of an overall Apple strategy. 

Although a product line that consists of only three server and three RAID models may not run deep enough to interest a wider corporate audience, Aberdeen’s Kastner suggests another model that may work for Apple.

“Given the product that it has, the company might ally with an Oracle in a scale-out architecture. It might be, for example, Oracle9i RAC [Real Application Cluster], a clustered version of Oracle that now runs on Linux. With [Oracle9i RAC or Oracle10g], you can run big enterprises — but running with more and more small servers instead of a big box,” Kastner said.

Apple also previewed Xgrid technology, a “computational clustering design from Apple’s Advanced Computation Group, mainly for the scientific and research communities.