[yellowdog-announce] New Xserve Cluster Node Offers Competitive Price/Performance: Press Release 2003 03/25

Media Relations media@terrasoftsolutions.com
Mon Mar 31 12:01:04 2003


Loveland, Colorado -- 25 March 2003 -- Terra Soft Solutions, Inc., the leading 
developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions, today promoted the new Apple 
Xserve "Cluster Node" and RAID boxes with highly competitive pricing for 
clusters of all sizes.

"The Xserve Cluster Node is simply perfect, offering the strongest 
price/performance advantage ever offered by Apple Computer. [The Cluster 
Node] takes full advantage of Yellow Dog Linux and our cluster management 
suite Black Lab as both are inherently designed to boot without local CD-ROM 
or video card," stated Kai Staats, co-founder and CEO of Terra Soft.

The new Cluster Node is a simplified but highly powerful 1U Xserve. Apple 
removed the AGP Gigabit card, video card, CD-ROM, and $1000 from the price 
tag. Designed to net-boot and perform as a clustered compute node, Terra Soft 
is pleased to showcase the Cluster Node as its preferred cluster offering.

With a basic, single unit cost of $2799 for a dual 1.33 GHz that provides 19 
GFlops performance, the price/performance ratio ($147/GFlop) provides stiff 
competition to Intel Xeon-based compute nodes for 32-bit calculations.

In addition, Terra Soft is pleased to immediately offer the Xserve RAID fiber 
channel storage solution in 720 GB, 1.26 Terabyte, and 2.52 Terabyte 
configurations with Yellow Dog Linux support.

As an Apple Authorized OEM VAR with discounts to educational facilities and 
university operated national labs, Terra Soft is enabled to provide volume 
discounts to commercial, government, and educational customers.

	For more information, visit:
	http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/apple/clusters.shtml

	To purchase, visit:
	http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/

The RAID box is shipping now. The Cluster Node is slated to ship by the end of 
April.


About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
Terra Soft is a leading developer of integrated solutions for PowerPC and an 
Apple OEM VAR. Yellow Dog Linux has boosted viability of Linux on PowerPC 
microprocessors with support for desktop, embedded, and HPC systems. Black 
Lab is an advanced, scalable, HPC cluster build and management suite.

For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com