OT: Apple's New xServe - 1U Rackmount Server

[Robert Brandtjen]

On Tuesday 14 May 2002 04:51 pm, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:
> Though for multiprocessor servers that have to be reliable, I'd pick
> Intel ahead of AMD at this point.  That may wipe out the price
> advantage (you can get P3 SMP for cheap but I wouldn't trust the
> cheap chipsets, and I'm not sure you can get the good P3 Xeon stuff
> any more, so you probably have to lay out big bucks for P4 Xeon).
> AMD SMP motherboards simply are not very good in my experience -- 3
> out of 4 Tyan Tiger MP system builds I know of had *serious* problems
> sooner or later.  The problems were all isolated to the Tyan boards
> by component swapping.  Hopefully MSI's new AMD SMP board will prove
> to be better...

MSI makes 3 different dual boards, AFAIK, there are no P4 SMP boards out =
yet -=20
not that just anyone can buy any way. My personal favorite, as always, is=
 the=20
Super Micro Board:=20
http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/RCC_LE/p3tdl3.htm

With today's cheap ram as well as the price of P3's and drives, this thin=
g=20
would easily smoke the new 1U unit from Apple. I personally don't trust t=
he=20
AMD SMP boards as yet - consider them "beta" at this point - I'm sure tha=
t=20
will change, however, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a=
 4=20
processor board, just for fun.

Most of my Mac assertions vis-a-vis Apple hardware speed, short commings,=
 etc.=20
come from XLR8YOURMAC and arstechnica, etc - but that's another email, no=
t=20
forgotten, just to busy to answer at the moment - building yet another SM=
P RH=20
machine - with 4 firewire ports, 4 USB ports, raid, etc - 1 gig of ram, a=
s=20
usual, all for significantly less then apple.=20

AS a final note about who would want it - I hardly think anyone considers=
 OSX=20
10.x to be enterprise level software, maybe when it reaches it's 10th=20
anniversary - 2006, it may be ready by then, after all, Apple didn't depl=
oy=20
OSX Server on it's own webservers until it reached 1.2 - but it lead lots=
 of=20
people to believe that 1.0 was ready.
--=20
 Robert Brandtjen
 --------------------------------------
 Web Site Creation and Hosting Services
 Hostmaster@prometheusmedia.com
 www.prometheusmedia.com