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Tuesday, May 14, 2002 |
 Apple's new server: Xserve. Does Apple finally 'get' servers? ( But we've been here before... picture (left, below the Xserver) is the ANS - Apple Network Server, aka Shiner. In 1995, Shiner was far beyond the then state of the art for a departmental-level server. It failed miserably (I know, I was in charge of marketing it to publishing markets), because a., Apple took too long to get it to market, b., no one took Apple seriously as a server supplier, c., there was no serious service or support beyond a marketing promise, d. there was no sales training (a salesperson sent the NY Times a server without a keyboard ot the OS), e. there's a million other reasons, but basically, Apple didn't get the enterprise or what makes it tick.
There's a natural fit in media production cos. and universities (digital video and compositing tools are particularly nice on Mac OS X), and the Apple product is evolutionary... I was a bit disappointed that Jonathan Ive wasn't giving us disc-shaped, levitating, translucent servers, but - reality check - the world runs on commodity 19-inch racks. A debugged, stable Mac OS X Server would make life easier on administrators: it's just easier, and it's got BSD under the hood, an OS that's already preferred (even over Linux) by many server admins.
The big drawback will be that cheap dual AMD servers beat the pants off the PowerPC architecture at the moment (no fault of Apple's) as long as the G4's 'Velocity Engine' (aka Motorola AltiVec instruction set) isn't being invoked. AMD/Intel can push bits down a pipe just as fast as G4, and have a considerable clock speed advantage for data-intensive apps (rendering, database) - more than levelling the RISC/CISC advantage of the G4. Xserve is cheaper than MS OS-powered machines, but not really cheaper than AMD-based Linux boxes. Good start, though... now, can Apple stick with it? Can Apple support it? I was impressed by the talk of 'humility'... |
Xserver has many physical features that remind me of Shiner, like the special HD mounts that hot-pop in and out. Mac OS X is a much better server OS than 'Classic' Mac OS was (but, it needs work, trust me... I run it), though the ANS ran AIX of all things (don't ask). |
'A commonwealth of high quality software' is a nice turn of phrase that British MD Adrian Midgley pointed me to, describing, of course, the Open Source movement. Adrian also points out that my reading list is WAY behind... and so is Random Access... content is sooo hard... Comments 5:52:01 PM 
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Maintenance today will result in some (hopefully) brief outages of www.gulker.com services... Apologies in advance if this creates inconvenience... Comments 12:39:03 PM
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Updated 4/16/04; 11:56:45 AM
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Chris Gulker'sUpdated 4/16/04; 11:56:45 AM
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