| Tuesday, May 14, 2002 |
19:20 - Just for posterity...
http://www.apple-history.com/quickgallery.html?where=ns500.html
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This is the great-uncle of the Xserve: the Network Server 500/700 series.
Small wonder this guy didn't sell well. It ran IBM's AIX, which in 1997 was already one of the less well-favored Unices; the washing-machine form-factor didn't suit itself well to data centers or much of anything else, really; and nobody really wanted to take Apple seriously in the server market anyway, especially not with an OS that they had no experience with.
Granted, the Network Server had some nice features: tons of hot-swappable SCSI disk array space, motherboard blades (so you could swap out a CPU for a new one in about two minutes), and some pretty neat industrial design work.
But that wasn't enough to make it catch on; after all, it was targeted at the high-end server market, where companies want big iron, not poseurs.
The Xserve is going after the low-end to middle-range server market, where 1U boxes handle web-serving and video-streaming duties and can be tasked as video workstations or rendering nodes. Plus, it's running OS X, so it has the mindshare advantage of "eating your own dogfood"-- very important to those IT managers and CIOs who know their business.
Whereas the Network Server was a confused beast, a solution searching for a problem-- the Xserve is a best-of-breed injected into a high-energy market, one where it's going to make tons of waves, whether the entrenched server industry likes it or not. Apple's here to stay.
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