Xserve Xeon review Part 1: Introduction

[I have elected to split this review into parts so that readers can view only those sections that matter to them. Note, too, that this has not passed through InfoWorld's Copy department, and it shows.]

At the August 2006 Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Apple's Steve Jobs announced that Xserve Xeon (my name--Apple refers to it as Xserve), its latest rack-mount server, would ship in October. It turned out that Apple didn't get Xserve Xeon into full production in October, but I was honored by the surprise delivery of one of the first Xserve Xeon units produced. I've seen and handled Xserve Xeon several times, but never powered up. The box arrived five days ago. I plugged it in and at that point, I unplugged my phone, my inbox, my BlackBerry and my clocks. Once I learned that Apple would start accepting pre-orders on October 25, I was determined to put a full review in the hands of prospective buyers, as well as those inclined to see Xserve Xeon as a two socket, four core Woodcrest rack server, indiscernible from the imagination-smothering overgrowth that is the Intel server market. For existing Xserve G5 owners and others running OS X Server, Xserve Xeon raises questions about whether it's worth a switch to Intel and what the risks and benefits will be.

Apple's new server is a story, not because I'm Mac-aligned, but because if Xserve Xeon were stripped of the logo, the aluminum and the trappings of Apple culture, it'd be hailed as a server design breakthrough. Xserve Xeon is an entry-priced Intel rack server engineered to satisfy mid-level server buyers' expectations. Compared with competing Intel rack servers based solely on performance, total hardware design, features, build quality, expandability, adherence to standards, manageability and serviceability, Xserve has no better among two-socket Core microarchitecture servers in the sub-$5,000 category. But to put Xserve Xeon in a fair lineup against other Woodcrest rack servers, you would either need to subtract $999 from Xserve's $2,999 base price or add the cost of a preconfigured, unlimited seat license of either Windows 2003 Small Business Server or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to the other contenders' price tags.

Unlike other Intel OEMs' boxes, Xserve Xeon ships from Apple as a server platform, not as a server. The difference? A server platform is a whole--hardware, OS, standardized services, GUI management, dev tools, server application frameworks, documentation and so on--that emerges from its shipping carton with functionality that fully satisfies the needs of the majority of buyers. When I plugged Xserve Xeon in for the first time, it did what I expected: It gave me my choice of services including Web, database, J2EE, e-mail, blog, IM, Windows and UNIX file/'print sharing, gateway, proxy, firewall, and on and on. It took about three minutes, with no reboot, to put all of those services on the air and hook them into a single GUI management interface. At the other extreme, Xserve Xeon will boot to a UNIX text console or to the server's serial port, it can be administered and configured entirely from the command line and nearly all of the non-user-facing pieces of OS X Server are available as Apple-supported open source. A platform is a whole, but it can be an infinitely malleable whole, at least as Apple approaches the Xeon Server platform. (you could just as well call it Apple's OS X Server platform; the hardware and OS deserve equal billing)