A
pple has done very strange things these days. Apple has just killed on of their most successful machines. The Xserve will be no more as of January 31st. The Xserve was a huge supercomputer that never really took off. The machine looked great and was very reliable, but the price for their performance was extremely high. The Xserve will be sadly missed by companies who use the Xserve. Apple’s clients will need to see a better version of the Xserve or will have to move to a different company. Apple is trying to push the MobileMe enterprise edition out to the public. Apple’s clients will have to switch to the Mac Pros or the Minis, unless Apple decides to license its servers. I doubt that Apple will license because Apple is unsure whether there will be a new version of the OSX Server. The 10.7 Lion Server is also in danger of being crushed. Apple is trying to focus on the Mac Pros and Minis which means that the Lion servers in a huge risk of being cut out. The 1U Rack mountable servers were always interesting to open up and figure out how Apple even pushed he motherboard, hard drives, and equipment into two dimensions.
I feel sad for Apple, by cutting the Xserves out that leaves a big gap in the computer industry. Many computers are mounted on the Xserve, it serves as an application, file server, web service, or even high performance computing applications using clustering. The Xserve initially featured one or two Power PC G4 processors nut was later switched over to the new PowerPC G5. Now it runs on two quad- core Intel Nehalem microprocessors. With the new Mac Pro with Snow Leopard coming out to replace the Xserve, it shows a huge difference between the two. The Mac Pro outdoes the Xserve with so much more storage; it compiles 1 TB when the Xserve only holds 160 GB. It holds 12U on shelf compared to 1U from the Xserve. The performance is almost exactly the same from file sharing and on. Apple is trying to say that the Mac Mini and Pro are smaller but brings great capability in an efficient form. The Mac Pro is the exact same price as the X serve with the snow Leopard. It may not be that hard of a transition after all.
[http://www.apple.com/xserve/]