Apple have announced the release of Xserve - their first rack mountable server, which allows up to 480 GB of "hot-swappable" storage. This is a huge step for the company as they try to penetrate the server market, focussing on education and graphics businesses. On Tuesday they made the announcement that this new system would be seeing the light of day and they have called it their first "serious server". Orders are being taken immediately and the system is expected to ship next month. The combination of this hardware and the Unix-based OSX will be a good test of Apple"s latest product development, and as always with Apple this product has a quite innovative styling.
Xserve will be suited to environments where Apple systems are already installed and industry specialists have said that they mean business as the system comes equipped with features such as a custom chip to facilitate the input and output functions of the machine. The specs vary depending on the need of the customer and allow the choice between either a single processor system with a 1Ghz G4 and a dual processor system with the same chip – the G4 has the advantage of having L2 and L3 high-speed cache memory. The systems will ship with 256 MB DDR memory for the single processor and 512 MB for the dual and will come in at £2,212 and £2,978 (GBP) respectively, excluding VAT.
The chief executive of Apple claimed that "This is the fastest Mac architecture we"ve ever built" but they remain sceptical as they see the market as one in which they are fairly inexperienced in. Apple also announced what they plan for the future, showing off a Xserve RAID which consisted of 14 hard disks which would combine to offer a whooping 1.68 terabytes storage.