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Wednesday, May 15, 2002
17:56 - More Xserve Comparisons

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Paul Summers, who is clairvoyant as to when I post new blog entries, writes me thus:

> Yes, it is.
> I can go to Dell and pay less than half of Apples asking price and come out with SCSI
> and RAID to boot.
> Anyway you slice it, nearly $8K for what is purported to be a server without SCSI is a
> rip. No doubt, Mac users will celebrate this as the "next big thing".

No, no you can't.

Dell Poweredge 1650
Dual PIII 1.13Ghz w/ 512K Cache
2GB 133MHz SDRAM
3x 72 GB UltraSCSI Drives
Embedded Raid
2x Copper GB Ethernet
Dell Remote Access Card
Cost: $10,336 With No OS (But to be fair, you could run FreeBSD and do nearly everything the XServe can do)

Now, the XServe comes with faster procs (debate if one wishes, but a 1Ghz G4 eats a 1.1 PIII for lunch), FAR more cache, ram that is twice as fast, 262 GB more storage space, and an OS with custom management goodies. And... it's $2500 bucks cheaper.

Granted, you don't get RAID nor SCSI disks. But, the machine is faster overall, and if you really must have RAID, an Adaptec 2400S is around $330 bucks. And, you'd actually be able to use it in the mac, as it wouldn't have all it's PCI slots full. (As the Dell would, with the two GB ethernet cards)

Besides, as I had forgotten until today, OS X has built-in software RAID... so if you really want redundancy, you can mirror your disks through that. Sure, it'd be slower; but it does get the job done. And Paul's hardware RAID is always an option.

By the by, remember that 220-odd GB number for the competition's storage that you wrote about at some length? I believe that was supposed to represent three 72GB SCSI drives, which comes to about that size. However, as the XServe has an extra drive, and uses bigger drives to boot, they indeed have nearly double the storage per unit.

If I were Dell, I'd be shitting bricks about now.

This same possibility occurred to me; I hadn't realized that Dell's HD sizes were so odd. But I guess that makes sense; so disregard those sections of my post from yesterday about how Apple's ad copy is misleading about total disk capacity versus the competition.

I don't know if Mike Dell is going to be rolling around in night sweats anytime soon over this, or having Steven the Dude hawk rack-mount servers (though I wouldn't mind seeing him cut his finger open on that PowerEdge front panel on nationwide TV every evening). But for the IT people who are worth their salaries, the Xserve is a powerful argument for treating Apple like a redoubtable contender.

Our own IT manager, when asked whether he wanted to switch to Xserves, thought for a moment, stared wistfully into the middle distance, and shook his head slowly and sadly with his chin in his hand-- which he described as being the head-shake of "I would if only I hadn't just spent the entire quarter's budget on brand-new server upgrades".
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© Brian Tiemann