Eight-core Xserve puts Apple back in the majors

Apple’s new Xserve is lean, mean, and green, like a Mac should be. What took Apple so long?

I never worried that Apple would let Xserve languish. It is a product that, if no one else bought it, Apple would produce for itself. I see Xserve as being engineered to track the requirements of the datacenters serving iTunes, .Mac, the Apple online store, Apple Developer Connection, and the rest of Apple’s vast, worldwide portfolio of Internet properties. Squeezing as many cores and DIMM sockets as possible into one rack unit isn’t a priority when you’re scaling out for fine-grained load balancing and minimal response time to requests from users. The extent to which Xserve’s Lights-Out Management (LOM) is exposed in server admin tools — power up, power down, and reboot — is as much as one would need in an enterprise operation where it’s easier to swap out a sick system than to diagnose it.

That Xserve Xeon was designed by Apple, for Apple, is merely partially informed speculation, but it gives me a quick answer to the “Is Apple serious about the enterprise?” question that I can never shake, as if I’m Apple’s appointed server apologist. “Yes,” I answer. “Its own.”

Even if Apple’s secret internal data center requirements haven’t evolved, market requirements and public perception have. Apple doesn’t just want to be a passenger on the big green bus. Apple wants to drive it, and Xserve’s lagging performance per watt forced Apple to reply to the green question by asserting the greenness of all Macs. Xserve, you see, is not a Mac, and is therefore exempt. Not to me, and now, not to Apple.

Apple has delivered the first substantially new Xserve since its last PowerPC G5 server. I haven’t touched Xserve yet — I’m getting my hands on it shortly after Macworld Expo — but on paper, Xserve puts Apple back in the lead relative to two-socket, x86 rack servers in its price class. I’ve written in detail about Xserve’s specifications in my Enterprise Mac blog. With the new Xserve, latency and bandwidth, which have always been great owing to OS X and the advantages of a controlled platform, are finally balanced with compute performance. Xserve uses Intel’s Harpertown, the two-socket Xeon edition of Intel’s Penryn 45 nanometer quad-core Core 2 platform. Harpertown’s got 12 megabytes of shared Level 2 cache per socket, a 1600MHz front-side bus, PCI-Express 2.0, 800MHz DDR2 memory, and is, in all regards, a thoroughly modern server. This, plus the availability of an add-in hardware RAID controller with battery-protected cache (which I have tested and found to be astonishing), makes Harpertown Xserve a peer among the best 1U rack servers.

Simply having an eight-core, Harpertown rack server isn’t sufficient to differentiate Apple from the rest of the x86 server space. For those of us with high standards for the use of the term “server,” Harpertown Xserve finally makes the grade. Like its Big Four counterparts Sun, HP, and IBM, Apple has custom-designed hardware — one look inside will convince you that Xserve is no cookie-cutter take on Intel’s reference design — that supports a limited range of unique devices. That control gave Apple the freedom to custom-design an OS optimized for only the peripherals it sells. It works out of the box, and you can’t knock it over. These are the advantages that keep HP-UX, AIX, and the enterprise releases of Solaris in high demand even though Linux and Windows have covered the earth. Now that Apple has a server worthy of its fresh yet mature UNIX server OS, questions about Apple’s stance on the enterprise can be considered answered. Indeed, with Apple’s meticulous pairing of software and server, it may be reasonable to ask whether any of the sellers of cookie-cutter rack boxes, running cookie-cutter OSes, can be taken seriously.