[zazou]

Love it. Love it all!

But I will toss in a minor gripe. minor.

Apple is late to the DDR party... late enough that they should have arrived with DDR PC2700 (333mzh). Call me whinny, but in 6 months it will be the PC standard, they should have caught this boat now.

Maybe in the towers in July, maybe it is a rack limitation.... i don't know...

Also, yep, that red mobo pic we saw was not even close. must be the new DDR board for the towers. And its form factor makes major case redesign an necessity.

Chrome Towers anyone?

[Floh]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
<STRONG>For the record, the red motherboard that was being sold on ebay doen't look anything like this motherboard... First off, it's blue...</STRONG>

Apple�s development/testing MoBos are red. Since this thing is released now there�s no reason for keeping it red.

[moki]

The xserve product is actually extremely well designed. A good friend of mine works at EMC, selling storage solutions to big-time customers like the WWF and Playboy... he's quite impressed by this product's design.

Not to mention the "big brother" Raid storage solution coming at the end of the year. They are getting some for their office to evaluate as a solution to customers. Neat stuff.

More info can be found here:

http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webboard/F...ML/000046.html

[ 05-14-2002: Message edited by: moki ]

[Smircle]

Originally posted by theiliad:

WHAT!!! no video....ahh crap

You can have it configured to accept one 4xAGP-Video card. Sounds good to me .)

[Leonard]

Originally posted by Smircle:
<STRONG>Originally posted by theiliad:

You can have it configured to accept one 4xAGP-Video card. Sounds good to me .)</STRONG>

or one PCI video card... if your going to use it as a server, you don't need a really good graphics card.

[ReggieX]

I want one with the Radeon, it'll fit nicely under my LaCie monitor and kick ass in Maya!

[Mithras]

There is very little actual b!tching going on in this thread.

Where's KellyHogan when you need him?

[Jim Paradise]

It'd be kinda fun to have the low-end one as a desktop...

"Check out ma gamez machine, biatches!"
"d00d, that's a rackmount... do you use it as a server?"
"Nah... it just looks cool and purrrs nicely."

??

[Leonard]

The picture of the inside looks interesting... two fans... probably to keep the hard drives and maybe the CPUs cool... but where are the heatsinks on the CPUs? I imagine the CPUs are the 2 square chips beside the RAM? Did they take off the heatsinks for the picture?

[jwblase]

Has anyone else noticed that the Server Monitor graphic says that it's running OS X server 10.1.5?

Mean anything?

JB

[Targon]

Looks beautiful asthetically.
zazou -&gt; DDR 400 is shipping now. (BTW Samsung chips are the fastest and most overclockable)
The Logic board looks VERY much like a Gigabyte board.

Price is bit of a killa partly due to Apple's configuration's.
Offer the Dual without the hard drive, the ram the video cards the Gigabit Enet card and the slim CDROM.

We could have a pretty hot A/V machine.

One thing that concerns me greatly.........how much acoustic NOISE does this thing transduce?? I could'nt see any environmental spec's. This may not be important in a server environment but in an Audio recording environment silence is gold.

Seeeeexy machine love the led's on the front.

Looks like MWNY will announce clock incremented PowerMac's with DDR boards, but no G5. MWSF2003 just another incremental clock increase. MWNY2003. Completely new case, with new G5 CPU/Board....matured OS X and hopefully the last right turn outta the long dark tunnel. Coolness!!!

[macaddled]

Originally posted by Targon:
<STRONG>One thing that concerns me greatly.........how much acoustic NOISE does this thing transduce?? I could'nt see any environmental spec's. This may not be important in a server environment but in an Audio recording environment silence is gold.</STRONG>

Two words: Machine room. The whole point of a rackmount is so you can stick this stuff away from your working environment.

'Course it would be great if it were perfectly silent.

[MRosenecker1]

OK. Design is nice. LOOKS nice. I don't know how many system administrators or network architects are going to take ATA/100 drives seriously. Even in an education market, I wouldn't trade SCSI for ATA. The sheer fact that they didn't even think to include it in the hot-swap bays is beyond incomprehensible. And don't even get me started on the 7200 RPM drives. I can run faster than those things can spin.

Digital media professionals, businesses, and likely even educational institutions are going to NEED SCSI drives in those hot-swap bays. If Steve gets his head out of his ass, perhaps he'll offer it as an add-on.

[Targon]

Originally posted by Mithras:
<STRONG>There is very little actual b!tching going on in this thread.

Where's KellyHogan when you need him?</STRONG>

No pls don't let the only possitive thread in ages be tormented

Anyone notice the CPU's in the pic on the "tech specs" page? Do they look they is on a duaghter card to u guys? I see 3 round thumbscrew like items, they could just be capacitors. Def'ntly looks like a Gigabyte board. I wonder if those ATA controllers are Promise...hmm

Ah such a sexy machine..... definately panty pullin material

[Stoopid]

"Rack 'n Roll"
Agh! I can just hear Jeff Goldblum's voice being forced to say this in some new pun-ridden apple ad. I'm surprised they didn't say "Rack em up."

[Mac Guru]

I want to see what the XserveRAID will look like... I know it's 3U but how can they add 10 more drives to it?

Mac Guru

[Leonis]

Originally posted by Mithras:
<STRONG>There is very little actual b!tching going on in this thread.</STRONG>

Here's one:

It doesn't run Windows

[Targon]

Originally posted by macaddled:
<STRONG>

Two words: Machine room. The whole point of a rackmount is so you can stick this stuff away from your working environment.

'Course it would be great if it were perfectly silent.</STRONG>

Dude, yes your right for servers. Audio...hmm well we prefer a computer in a rack within arms reach like the other rack gear. A machine room is a forced workaround and very expensive one at that with excessively long monitor and usb cables and also I/O cables. Little pic here i snagged from another thread without permission..im sure the dude wont mind tho. This may give you an insight into the requirement. Still i'd like to know the noise spec.

[macaddled]

Originally posted by Targon:
<STRONG>Audio...hmm well we prefer a computer in a rack within arms reach like the other rack gear.</STRONG>

Our audio department all works out of machine rooms; they just have mixers and decks within arms' reach. Cuts down a lot on noise and heat.

[mbryda]

Originally posted by MRosenecker1:
<STRONG>OK. Design is nice. LOOKS nice. I don't know how many system administrators or network architects are going to take ATA/100 drives seriously. Even in an education market, I wouldn't trade SCSI for ATA. The sheer fact that they didn't even think to include it in the hot-swap bays is beyond incomprehensible. And don't even get me started on the 7200 RPM drives. I can run faster than those things can spin.

Digital media professionals, businesses, and likely even educational institutions are going to NEED SCSI drives in those hot-swap bays. If Steve gets his head out of his ass, perhaps he'll offer it as an add-on.</STRONG>

Why? ATA Can provide the throughput. Look at what the Wintel servers are doing- IBM 1U ATA Standard, Dull 1U ATA Standard... ATA may not have the "glamour" of SCSI, but it's getting to be a viable solution. Not everyone needs 10kRPM drives, especially if they are pushing out of a 100MB network (Which is, what, 4MB/sec?).... You are still limited by that connection, no matter how many users you have.

-Matt

[Targon]

hehe replace the rack n roll with "http://www.flashyourrack.com/" lol couldnt resist

[boardsurfer]

Originally posted by Mac Guru:
<STRONG>

I want to see what the XserveRAID will look like... I know it's 3U but how can they add 10 more drives to it?

Mac Guru</STRONG>

Here's a pic

[Mr.E]

Two 66 MHZ PCI slots? I'm dropping 4k on this baby and plopping twin Rage 128's in there...

I'll be the envy of the Mac community!

[eep!]

Originally posted by Drakino:
<STRONG>On the competition front, not too bad, though people may balk at paying unknown prices for propritary IDE drives.</STRONG>

propriatary drives? where? I think they'll just be standard ATA100 drives in a hotswap caddy. You get one drive with the machine (unless you BTO) but you'll get the empty caddies with the machine (i'm betting)

[Leonard]

Originally posted by eep!:
<STRONG>

propriatary drives? where? I think they'll just be standard ATA100 drives in a hotswap caddy. You get one drive with the machine (unless you BTO) but you'll get the empty caddies with the machine (i'm betting)</STRONG>

They're selling proprietary hot-swapable drives. I don't see anything about caddies...

As for having SCSI drives, go ahead, add a SCSI card and an external RAID array. I'm sure someone makes an external rack-mounted RAID array.

[SkullMacPN]

Originally posted by Mac Guru:
<STRONG>

I want to see what the XserveRAID will look like... I know it's 3U but how can they add 10 more drives to it?

Mac Guru</STRONG>

Like this: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...168/1josr.html

[as2]

I think it's good, and will hopefully do apple some good...

Noticed that the demo on the website was running OS X.1.5 Server, so perhaps that revision includes all necessary support software, if X.1.4 doesnt.



Adam

[mitchell_pgh]

All things considered, this really wasn't a bad first major step into the rack mount systems for Apple. $3G's isn't bad for a starter server (actually it's around $5G's after you get a few more HD's and RAM). We also need to consider that some people will be buying 10+ of these things at a time.

I consider this a very positive stop gap item for Apple. People are starting to purchase OSX boxes, and tying them into Unix Servers... The next logical solution would be to get a Apple Server.

At my first job ever, I was forced to do backup on a Intel box. Perhaps this will help such organizations.

[thunderous_funker]

Originally posted by mbryda:
<STRONG>

Why? ATA Can provide the throughput. Look at what the Wintel servers are doing- IBM 1U ATA Standard, Dull 1U ATA Standard... ATA may not have the "glamour" of SCSI, but it's getting to be a viable solution. Not everyone needs 10kRPM drives, especially if they are pushing out of a 100MB network (Which is, what, 4MB/sec?).... You are still limited by that connection, no matter how many users you have.

-Matt</STRONG>

SCSI drives have higher reliability for server applications (always on) but the speed gap has been seriously narrowed. ATA is cheap and reasonably realiable and almost as fast.

I for one have always said that as soon as Apple could make a 1U server with great I/O for the right price, nothing could stop me from running out and buying it for my company.

I stand corrected. Apparently I will have to wait until Apple puts in Hardware RAID control and RAID 5. How they built this truly great box and left out something so basic is beyond me.

I'm always defending Apple amoung Network Admins but this is just retarded. Software RAID?? Retarded. It's not like it's hard or expensive to put in a RAID chip. Come on guys!!!!!

[command-tab]

"One half-length 32-bit PCI/AGP combo slot..."

A PCI/AGP slot in one? How is that possible?

And is this machine really made by Apple, and not...God?

[cdhostage]

I wonder how well Carracho would do on a multiterabyte drive setup....

[JohnD]

And I thought Apple would introduce a 2U server blade box with eight dual proc blades each........

[osiris]

I guess this means the end of the G4 Tower server with OS X Server.

Now the same configuration G4 costs $1000 more because you have to buy the server software.
That bites.

[Gene Jockey]

Originally posted by Leonard:
<STRONG>

They're selling proprietary hot-swapable drives. I don't see anything about caddies...

As for having SCSI drives, go ahead, add a SCSI card and an external RAID array. I'm sure someone makes an external rack-mounted RAID array.</STRONG>

Did you go look here?

Looks to me like SCA caddies using regular old ATA drives. I'll grant you that maybe they don't come apart easy, that sounds like Apple, but you can see the drive in the pics. Anyone with initiative should be able to crack 'em and replace the drive.

--J

[theolein]

Quote:
"Xserve lets you eliminate the most galling expense in your department�s budget: the usurious per-user �tax� you�ve been obliged to pay for using server software. Since Xserve comes with an unlimited-client license of the UNIX-based, industrial-strength Mac OS X Server, you can serve thousands of additional users � without spending thousands of additional dollars in licensing fees. "

Is it just me or is this going to spell the end of the Microsoft-Apple "friendly" relationship? Judging from all the dissing and FUDding that Microsoft let out aginst Linux last year, because they were terrified that Linux was gonna take the server away from them, they're gonna be pissed about this little gem. Perhaps not though, most big places run MSexchange for mail AFAIK.

[Mac Zealot]

Originally posted by osiris:
<STRONG>I guess this means the end of the G4 Tower server with OS X Server.

Now the same configuration G4 costs $1000 more because you have to buy the server software.
That bites.</STRONG>

No, go to the powermac section and click where it asks if you're looking for servers...

Easy nuff?

________________

The rackmount DOES use standard ATA drives, a pic of the caddy would be this:



I'm willing to bet you can pull the drives out

[chris v]

It looks like a little piece of the Cube lives on in the drive trays. The handles look to be the same push-in to release design as the handle on the bottom of the Cube that you use to access its guts.

I'd imagine, as well, that you can pop a drive in and out of those trays in 15 seconds, or less.

CV

[The Placid Casual]

I'm not a real techie, but I'm not too sure about the benefits of the DDR implementation in the Xserve...

The system bus is STILL 133. However, apple claim the DDR is double pumped to 266..so correct me if I'm wrong, but the 266 DDR will only be in effect from the RAM to the memory controller...NOT to processors...doesn't this defeat the whole point of DDR?

From my limited knowledge, it would seem that the DDR will not contribute to towards faster system performance...the only thing it does is allow for another 500 MB RAM and possibly improve AGP performance by utilising the extra memory bandwidth...

I am not complaining because as servers go these are pretty awesome, but is this a bit of 'key/hype' word usage by apple without real performance gains...

Anyway, regardless of my minor gripe, I'm totally impressed and hope Xserve will be a real success...

Peace,

Marc

[Leonard]

Originally posted by Gene Jockey:
<STRONG>

Did you go look here?

Looks to me like SCA caddies using regular old ATA drives. I'll grant you that maybe they don't come apart easy, that sounds like Apple, but you can see the drive in the pics. Anyone with initiative should be able to crack 'em and replace the drive.

--J</STRONG>

But does Apple sell the caddies? If they don't sell the caddies, you'll have to buy the harddrive/caddy modules from Apple. Yes, you can probably replace an existing HD, but if you want to save money on the initial purchase, it doesn't look like you can buy the caddies and then purchase HDs separately at a reasonable price.

[tooki]

Originally posted by command-tab:
[QB]"One half-length 32-bit PCI/AGP combo slot..."

A PCI/AGP slot in one? How is that possible?/QB]

Presumably the connectors are very close together, and the opening on the back modular, so that either card will fit.

As for the color of prototype motherboards: I bet the blue mobo in the picture is also a prototype. Apple has used all sorts of colors for prototypes in the past (red, blue, yellow, and several shades of green), but production units are always green.

tooki

[ 05-14-2002: Message edited by: tooki ]

[maffioso]

Awesome, I can't wait to see the next round of PM's!!!

What does the current Duel 1Ghz get in Megaflops?...

Thanks

Here is a pic

[tobster]

Originally posted by tooki:
<STRONG>

... I bet the blue mobo in the picture is also a prototype. Apple has used all sorts of colors for prototypes in the past (red, blue, yellow, and several shades of green), but production units are always green.</STRONG>

Aren't the mobos in the G4 iMacs blue?

- tobs

[Drakino]

propriatary drives? where? I think they'll just be standard ATA100 drives in a hotswap caddy

Key words there, a hot swap caddy that is non standard, thus forcing me to Apple for drive upgrades. SCSI, I could deal, but not IDE. SCSI is still more reliable in a server, and definitly offers benefits over IDE like 10k and 15k RPM speeds. Command queuing is another big one, and bigger drive cache.

If Apple thinks that the upcoming storage enclosure is going to sell well beyond Mac faniatics, they better think again.

As far as noise, 1U servers are very noisy. I don't expect the Apple version to be different.

And the PCI solution is nice with 3 possible slots, but taking one away for video takes that advantage away quickly. Throw the video and second NIC on the motherboard, thus allowing 2 fibre cards for redundancy, plus one slot free.

Oh, and on the memory, it is nice to see. Though interleaved SDRam preforms at the same speed, at the cost of having to pair DIMMS. Not uncommon in servers, I'm suprised they didn't try to interleave the DDR memory to jump ahead of other 1U servers like the Proliant DL360 G2.

[ 05-14-2002: Message edited by: Drakino ]

[istallion]

Originally posted by command-tab:
<STRONG>"One half-length 32-bit PCI/AGP combo slot..."

A PCI/AGP slot in one? How is that possible?

And is this machine really made by Apple, and not...God?</STRONG>

The two slots are side-by-side, however there is only enough room to use one at a time. There is also only one backplate opening in the case. This is how all those agp/pci/isa/amr shared slots are built.

The system bus is STILL 133. However, apple claim the DDR is double pumped to 266..so correct me if I'm wrong, but the 266 DDR will only be in effect from the RAM to the memory controller...NOT to processors...doesn't this defeat the whole point of DDR?

That's correct. The system bus is limited to 1GB/s. 266 DDR has 2.1GB/s. In comparison, Intel's dual xeon motherboard has 3.2GB/s system bus, and AMD's SMP chipset has 2.1GB/s per processor. This would be my only concern because I've seen tests were even these were bottlenecks.

[red44dog44]

This is great. Only concern is a redundant power supply

[Graymalkin]

Having DDR memory does increase the speed of data transfers between the processors and memory. That is the point of DDR, the processor wants to run at say for instance a gigahertz. The fact the systems bus doesn't run at the same speed is a drawback in the eyes of the processor. A processor running with DDR memory has the ability to use the full DDR bandwidth. If they didn't why in the hell would anyone use DDR.

Also the IDE drives come in caddies, if Apple doesn't sell these then somebody else will. How many companies sold drives that would fit into the bays of Wallstreet, Lombard, and Pismo Powerbooks? It isn't like the design is made from some alien metal produced with technology from the 24th century. They're SCA caddies, that is about it. If the IDE controllers are worth anything they have similar abilities to SCSI common SCSI controllers. An ATA drive on a sophisticated controller isn't going to be much dumber than a SCSI drive at a lower cost per disk. SCSI isn't specifically required for a server grade system, the features that SCSI has are required. If you've got a high quality ATA controller that offers SCSI features the more expensive SCSI option isn't needed.

I think these servers are cool, they're definitely competitive with equivilent x86 based rackmount servers. One winning feature these have over other rackmount systems is the unlimited server license on them. Instead of paying out the a$$ due to licensing costs over the lifetime of the system you have a one time up front cost and maybe AppleCare or basic maintenance. It is still a damn site cheaper than paying user licenses on server software. Microsoft charges beaucoup fees for Win2000/XP server and doesn't really allow its OEM partners to offer unlimited licenses.

[osiris]

Originally posted by Mac Zealot:
<STRONG>

No, go to the powermac section and click where it asks if you're looking for servers...

Easy nuff?

</STRONG>

you betcha!

[jguidroz]

If you check out www.macnn.com front page, they say Apple will not be selling the caddies. So question is, will the server come with 4 caddies even if you only buy one drive, or do you just get one caddie?

[Superchicken]

MSexchange?

Does anyone else see the irony in naming a product that?
I mean we all knew that windows users didn't have the balls to use a Mac but that's kinda mean of microsoft to say that

But does anyone else think apple's gona use some of the things they did in designing this to kinda make their power Macs more flat? Like personally I'm thinking apple's gona do something with their LCDs and have like some sorta marketing stratagy, "your monitor is flat, now have a flat power mac" or somethin like that. I dono but yeah...

Anyway, now I gota try to find a host that uses OS X

[echoes]

When we start seeing benchmarks of these systems and there isn't that much improvement over the regular Quicksilver Dual 1GHz -- try not to take that as a damning of DDR just yet. For whatever reason (buzzword compliance?), Apple chose only to implement DDR on the memory bus and left the system bus (FSB) the same -- which unfortunately is still the huge bottleneck it�s always been:

Hardware Specifications

Processor
Single or dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors
Velocity Engine vector processing unit
Full 128-bit internal memory data paths
Powerful floating-point unit supporting single-cycle, double-precision calculations
Data stream prefetching operations supporting four simultaneous 32-bit data streams
256K on-chip L2 cache running at processor speed
2MB DDR SDRAM L3 cache per processor, with up to 4GB/s throughput
133MHz system bus supporting over 1GB/s data throughput

Memory
256MB or 512MB of 266MHz PC2100 DDR SDRAM, with up to 2.1GB/s throughput
Four DIMM slots supporting up to 2GB of DDR SDRAM using the following:
Repeat one or all
� 128MB or 256MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 128Mbit technology)
� 512MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 256Mbit technology)

Well at least this will have some benefit as far as DMA transfers are concerned but until Apple implements a double pumped FSB to go along with the DDR memory we won't see the real performance it should bring.

Here's to hoping that if Apple adds DDR on the towers come MWNY they'll do it right.