Deepening its commitment to the enterprise, Apple Computer on Monday will announce its new Xserve and the company's first storage product, Xserve RAID.
Touting an aggressive combination of pricing, performance, and services, Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple is openly targeting edge-server rivals Sun, IBM, and Dell in a move analysts suggest represent a deliberate attempt to move beyond core markets.
Available in March, the servers and the accompanying Server Admin and Java-based RAID Admin tools leverage Apple's open-standards strategy.
"We want to be at the portable fast end of the spectrum with an open-source model but also have all those benefits that you [expect from] Sun," Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said during an exclusive briefing with InfoWorld.
The news comes at a time when enterprises continue to seriously evaluate Apple's long-term commitment to server-based products, according to Gordon Haff , senior analyst at Illuminata in Nashua, N.H. "Ultimately, Apple needs to do something like this [because] desktops are getting so commoditized and so much of the intelligence is moving into the network and server," Haff said. "The role for a consumer-friendly, special desktop environment [such as Apple’s Mac OS] … has to inevitably decrease as you move to thinner [mobile] computers."
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