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Xserve G5
Traditionally, the Unix server market has
been dominated by the likes of Sun, IBM, HP, etc., while Apple
was considered to reside in the domain of desktop computing.
However, Apple also has products to address this market segment
and has produced server class machines with its G4 processor-based
architectures. The Xserve G5 is the evolution of its predecessor,
and as the name suggests is based on the G5 chip.
At the heart of this server are two 64 bit
G5 processors, that provide enough horsepower to run enterprise
applications – up to 2.3 Ghz to be precise! To harness
this raw power you require equally powerful peripheral devices,
and the G5 is amply equipped in this department as well. Consider
this – it has a front side bus dedicated to each CPU,
can have up to 16 GB of DDR error correcting memory, up to
12 TB of RAID storage, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a high
bandwidth system controller to control network traffic and
yet manage data exchange with peripherals
One of the primary issues in cramming so
much power in a 1U box is the problem of reducing power consumption
and heat. Apple has achieved this with aplomb, as the G5 chip
consumes only a third or half the power of comparable servers
from Intel. However, this did come at a small price –
Apple had to sacrifice a drive bay which had to give way to
make room for cooling intakes. Out of the 38 sensors on the
motherboard, as many as 10 are dedicated to monitoring the
temperature of the system!
The issue of heat control becomes especially
important if you are clustering the servers, which brings
us to the next feature of the Xserve – its adaptability
in a High Performance Computing environment. This is achieved
by its ability to be clustered with the elimination of unnecessary
components, making it a dense and a low price – high
performance processing environment. You can stack up to 42
xServe units for truly formidable processing power.
The Xserve comes with Apple’s latest
and award winning Unix based operating system, Mac OS X Server
Version, Tiger. This is a 63 bit OS, which provides a standard
based operating environment without the complexity of Linux,
and yet is ideal for hosting enterprise applications. It provides
a de-mystified user interface to the Server Administrator,
through an intuitive graphical user interface, removing the
complexity of traditional UNIX based server environments.
Apple has designed this to be a cost effective
server that provides a comprehensive environment for a wide
variety of applications from enterprise computing environments
to complex simulation applications to humbler applications
such as hosting secure websites.
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