| Tuesday, May 14, 2002 |
22:10 - Potential Xserve Liabilities
http://www.apple.com/xserve/
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Yes, it does have some.
First of all: the drive bays are not RAID. There are up to four independent drive modules, each on a different ATA channel, so you can maximize simultaneous access by putting complementary data sources on different spindles (as I discovered to be so damn effective on the lionking.org server), but it means that you can yank the drive with the OS on it. Yes, you can have up to 480GB of space available-- but with RAID, you'd have 120GB of guaranteed space.
(Well, actually more like 218GB-- about 2/3 the total space, as the math weirdly works out.)
But I'm told that 1U servers don't usually have RAID, at least not without special build-to-order options (which could potentially be added to the Xserve for the same cost as on a PC unit), and not with ATA disks, and not at the Xserve's price point. So that's probably not much of a worry, if I believe Paul.
Secondly: As I mentioned before, the decision to go with ATA disks is bound to upset SCSI snobs. Apple touts the fact that for a much lower cost than SCSI, you can get faster throughput, larger capacity, and lower running temperature. But I'm assured by my colleagues that SCSI is still going to be the bus of choice among true professionals-- that ATA still has many unfortunate limitations that SCSI handles much better, and that the temperature and capacity arguments are very marginal ones. I suspect that Apple will take some heat for the ATA decision, though it can't be denied that it keeps the price nice and low.
I'm aware of there being some problems with SCSI and Darwin-- apparently the two don't play terribly nicely together. That's why I have to have my SCSI scanner powered on when I boot my OS X machine, or else it won't load the shims to be able to access the bus; I can turn the scanner off and on as much as I want during uptime, but it can't be off during boot and then be discovered later. An Adaptec engineer told me a few months ago that this was a hot point of contention among Apple and the Darwin developers, and that it would seriously hamper OS X's abilities to compete in a SCSI-based server environment. So it strikes me that the decision to go ATA is in part a way for Apple to sidestep that SCSI issue, and that may well be the primary motivator, even beyond price.
I hope they plan to address the SCSI shortcomings, but considering their view that ATA and FireWire are the future, it may not be in the cards.
Item the Third: The "Server Monitor" application is OS X-only. This is fine for shops that already have Macs (education, creative, biotech) and for shops that are very large and buying pallets of Xserves and can easily afford to add an iMac or an iBook to the order for administration. But for shops (like the one where I work) that would be adding an Xserve to a server room populated with NetFinitys and PowerEdges running Linux, FreeBSD, and Win2K, and where there are effectively no OS X desktop machines in the company (and especially not any in IT), this would be a hard sell. I expect a lot of incredulous double-takes from IT purchasers who notice that they won't be able to get the full administrative feature set unless they buy a Mac on which to run the admin client.
Granted, the Server Monitor is a neato Aqua app, with lots of Quartz effects in completely gratuitous places (bets as to whether those status line graphs are antialiased?). But it seems to me that they're going to be under a fair amount of pressure to bring out a Windows version of the app fairly soon, if they expect goodwill among IT adopters.
But then again, the Server Monitor is not the total administrative package-- it's a value-add. (So is the Admin Tool, which is now client-server and controls all the stuff like Apache, FTP, DNS, and so on-- and is OS X-only.) But you can just as easily do all your admin work using SSH and the command line, like on any UNIX-- or even through the serial console, or the local video terminal. So as it occurs to me, this is "iPod mentality" at work: Basic functionality is available regardless of your platform... but if you want the full experience, you need a Mac. And considering the number of people in my company who are buying iPods without owning a Mac to use it with, and who a few weeks later end up nursing an iBook-sized hole in their credit cards, it could well be a piece of marketing genius.
Whereas Windows-type value-adds are software that you have to pay for through the nose, on a per-seat basis, Apple's value-adds (iTunes, iMovie, full iPod functionality, Server Monitor) are free software-- that you have to have a Mac to run it on. A value-add involves a carrot and a sale; for the Windows style, the carrot is functionality and the sale is a license to use a single copy of the software that provides that functionality. (And licenses are easy to be dishonest about, which leads to audits.) For Apple, the carrot functionality is free, but the sale-- which involves buying a Mac-- creates a Mac user in the bargain. It's an actual advantage of having small market penetration. Very clever. Whoever figured this out-- and managed to turn a marginal market share into a sales advantage-- deserves the Nobel Prize for Marketing.
Item Numero Cuatro: Some of the PR copy on the Apple site is rather disingenuous; I can't tell whether it's deliberately misleading, or just ill-informed. For instance, the 480GB of disk space is touted as over twice as much as the 218GB competition-- but that figure is accurate for a fully-loaded RAID5 system, not cumulative drive space the way it's counted for the Xserve. And on the Storage page, the copy says:
Pop in four 60GB or 120GB Apple Drive Modules into your Xserve systems and you can keep expanding your storage space exponentially — and affordably.
This is very bad, and I hope someone fixes it right quick. (It seems someone has already deleted the explicit mention of 218GB since this afternoon, from the main Xserve page.) This is linear expansion, not exponential. Something tells me that whoever wrote this copy had heard the term "exponential growth" and assumed that it meant "lots of growth", and put it in here without a second thought. Well, if any IT guys who understand what "exponential" means read the Xserve page and run across this little gaffe, they're going to think, "What else on this site is a misleading half-truth?"
Fithfthly: The Xserve only has a single power supply, not the dual/redundant one that one might expect. High-end servers need to have separate power plugs which can be attached to separate circuit bars, so the machine will stay online if a) a power supply quits or b) one of the circuits loses power. But I'm not too concerned about this, because I don't think many (or any) 1U servers have redundant power supplies. This is just competitive lock-step here-- but customer demand might mean Apple will have to try to cram another supply in there some damn how.
I suspect that these first few months of Xserve sales will tell Apple a lot about what the customers are really going to demand, and what tweaks they're going to need to make in the offering. For instance, Kris noted that Apple might end up having to stock third-party racks and cabinets at the online Apple Store, just like they stock third-party cameras and external drives-- because IT buyers, especially ones making big pallet purchases, will want to get all their gear from the same supplier. These kinds of questions, like the ones about whether customers will demand RAID drives or whether they'll consider the lack of a Windows version of Server Monitor a deal-breaker, is stuff that they'll have to learn the hard way.
But the good news is that out of the gate, they've built a machine that's designed slavishly to customer needs, and they've got a bloody good place to start from.
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