Product Reviews

The arrival of an Intel-based server from Apple marks the completion of a surprisingly painless migration from PowerPC to x86. It also presents a number of current and potential users with a dilemma over whether to upgrade or deploy Apple's powerful new 1U rack server.

On first looks, you'll be hard pressed to see any exterior differences between the new Xserve and its PowerPC predecessor. Apple has retained the same chassis in order to get its first Intel-based rack server to market, so it has 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 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, optionally, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drives, dual 8x PCI-Express slots, eight DDR-2 memory sockets with support for 32GB of Ram and the all-important dual-core processors. The basic configuration we review here features two 2GHz dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 processors with 4MB shared Level 2 cache and 1.33GHz frontside bus per processor, effectively making this a quad-processor 64-bit server. If this isn't enough, you can opt for the 2.66GHz or 3GHz versions of the 5100 chips.

The Xserve comes supplied with a Universal Binary version of Mac OS X 10.4 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.

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

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than a dual 2.3GHz G5.

Retaining the same chassis design has produced one key 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 backwardly compatible with Sata I, and Apple has retained the same caddy connector, which means any existing investment you have in drives won't 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 7200rpm 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 or 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, and performing software installations, OS reinstalls and initial hard drive partitioning.

Standard Xserve configurations come with a single hot-swappable 650W power supply. However, the chassis is built to take two in order to allow both hot-swapping and redundancy.

Further, at 14.4 kg for the basic configuration, going up to 17.7kg for a fully loaded Xserve, it isn't light. The sturdy all-metal chassis has many advantages in terms of keeping the Xserve cool and reasonably quiet, but at the cost of being back-breakingly heavy. With this in mind, each Xserve comes supplied with a complete set of very sturdy rolling rack rails, allowing you to move it out easily from a rack after initial fitting if you ever need to get under the hood or remove it completely.

With a starting price of £2199, the Xserve is far from cheap - in fact, it rates among the most expensive 1U rack servers on the market when compared with its Windows-based counterparts. However, few servers on the market at any price can offer the same combination of build quality, performance, backward hardware compatibility and ease of deployment.