Apple’s new Workgroup Clusters are a perfect fit

If you are an IT geek, you’ll recognize everything on this list as best-of-breed kit. It’s boutique hardware that your boss would scratch off your purchase order as extravagant, but that you, I and Apple know makes the difference between a 12 month investment and a deskside cluster that will enjoy a long and distinguished career.

If you’re trying to put a practical dollar value on this solution, don’t forget the bundled hardware service contract, the phone support and the spare parts kit.

Couldn’t you save money by building the same thing with dual-core P4 “servers,” Linux, a Cisco switch and a Brand B UPS? Be my guest. While you’re spending weeks building, tweaking, cussing and blaming the equipment for the work you’re turning in late, I’ll be working.

And lest you think that I have to rely on projection to calculate the potential value of Apple Workgroup Clusters, the deskside cluster is an exact fit with my work. My direct experience covers distributed and cooperative digital media production, team software development, centralized workgroup services, and small-to-medium business infrastructure. So often in my work, I’ve had a need for a scalable, simple, plug and go, self-contained cluster solution, but it never existed. It was big iron or lots of discrete PC servers, but I always wanted something right in the middle. That’s why I find Apple’s Workgroup Clusters so attractive.

A phone call, a visit from UPS, a screwdriver, a friend to help me push the thing up my stairs, and the rearrangement of piles of books to get to a wall outlet is exactly the level of effort I consider appropriate to set up a deskside four-server, 64-bit Unix RISC cluster. If I were willing to set aside my requirements for 64 bits and Unix with a U (which I won’t), I might let a PC vendor pitch me an alternative. But if that vendor offered to match Apple’s configuration at half the price but added just one step to the setup process, dispatched consultants to do God-knows-what to boxes I own, or locked me into their brand, or put a ceiling on my scalability, or gave me two places to call for support depending on what kind of problem I’m having, they’d be out in the street.

I confess that I wouldn’t bother taking PC server vendors’ calls to begin with; I know exactly what to expect from them, and I know what to expect from Apple. Considering Apple Workgroup Clusters’ ideal configurations, services, software, documentation and build quality, all other clusters are officially overpriced and not worth the effort to assemble.