Apple’s Xserve Xeon: Built to fall apart

[Please note: Contrary to the link on Apple’s home page, this is not my review of Xserve Xeon. That is coming shortly; watch this space. I understand the reason for the minor mix-up and I always appreciate links to my content. However, I have not tested Xserve Xeon. I have only been allowed a guided, semi-hands-on encounter with the box at Apple’s Cupertino campus. This entry addresses build quality, one of very few attributes I’m willing to address prior to one-on-one production testing.

Don’t touch that dial. I promise you that when I hit Xserve Xeon you’ll be the first to know. My whole life’s been leading up to this.]

A couple of weeks ago, Apple invited me to its campus to get a close-up look at Apple’s Xserve Xeon. It is a marvel of physical design, so much so that I find that it implausible that Xserve Xeon and Xserve G5 could have been designed by the same company. Xserve G5 was pretty tight, but Xserve Xeon makes its predecessor, not to mention every PC 1U rack server I’ve seen, look slapped together.

I was struck by perfectly Xserve Xeon was designed, and in particular by how easily it comes apart. I have high standards in this regard. I told a friend that I will only buy or recommend servers that I can install, remove, disassemble and repair with one hand, a TSA-approved butter knife and no instructions. While others are marveling over the blue LEDs on the front panel (which, yes, now reflect the load of four cores), I’m looking for blobby spot welds and for paper-thin steel that’s been bent into a U to grip a cooling fan (once). I look for hacks done to make a server interior “tool-less,” such as levers hooked to long rods hooked to blades that work as embedded pry bars. In that well thought-out design, the tool-lessly removable part is exactly where it would be in, and uses exactly the same type of connector as, a tool-fully serviceable server. A sexy server assembled with a welder, a metal brake and a torque wrench is like a sports car that drives perfectly well, but which requires a pneumatic nut driver to open the door.

Apple’s Xserve Xeon falls apart with the slightest touch, and I like that. I don’t mean that it’s fragile. Like most of what Apple has made, Xserve Xeon is obviously ruggedized to survive a fall. Not that any server would ever slip out of your rack, and no reader of this blog has ever tipped a rack over by sliding out that 3U RAID rack you (I mean, that ham-handed assistant of yours) mounted too high. Apple troubled to make connectors that friction fit very tightly, yet don’t need to be wiggled loose. As with other rack servers, Xserve Xeon’s fan bank is removable. But in Xserve Xeon, it lifts right out with almost no effort. Likewise, the logic board is not rectangular. It snakes around the chassis like a road laid on a riverbank; by my recollection, it never ducks under other components. It was not demonstrated to me, but it appeared that the motherboard could be unscrewed (it uses fat, grippy thumbscrews) and lifted straight out. There are very few cable connections from the motherboard to the chassis and to peripherals, and no opportunity to get a cable in the wrong spot. I should also note that there are no long ribbon cables stretching across the chassis to connect a drive that’s planted up front to an on-board SCSI connector near the back. The chassis was designed first, and the logic boards were designed to fit it. What a concept.

You can see that I am a connoisseur of server design, and that I have no tolerance for rack servers that aren’t built to micrometric tolerances. I’ll test this theory when I get an evaluation unit, but it looked to me like any piece of Xserve Xeon, from the logic to the power supplies to the fan bank, and even the CPUs, can be removed and replaced in a five-minute operation while eating pizza. Apple even redesigned the rack attachment to–get this–eliminate the need for cage nuts. Yes, someone at Apple stood up in a design meeting and said, “look, this two motors per fan idea is nice and all, but can’t we do something about those darned cage nuts?”

Xserve Xeon is, as all commercial servers should be, built to be user-serviceable. You can buy packaged spare parts kits and get AppleCare walkthroughs of parts replacement. If you have multiple Xserve Xeons, you can scavenge and swap parts, just as God intended.

Now, having found myself in this situation before, I feel compelled to ask readers: Is my obsession with operator-centered design mine alone, or do people in the real world make buying decisions based on a server’s build quality? Do you have a 1U x86 box in your rack that you could disassemble and put back together, sans diagrammatic assistance, more easily than a kid’s bike? I know that’s desirable. I just don’t know whether anyone thinks that’s worth $2,999 when a perfectly functional, but horribly built two-socket x86 rack server can be had for half that. It is typical now that the minimum unit of field replacement is the entire system. Is that just the way of things?