[rescue] Xserve

[Nathaniel Grady]

[ snip - why video card  - snip ]

What they really need to do is make a cool looking, silvery color bracket to 
mount one in the middle of a of a Cinema HD display but moving the front 
panel lights to in a special panel under the display. It should be more than 
tall enough to fit sideways. Or, even cooler looking but probably less 
space-efficient would be to make the top have dimples for the Cinema-HD 
display to fit into... that would be a *SWEET* workstation - 4x120gb RAID, 
dual 1ghz cpu's... Maybe I'm being silly - Caves and such are probably what 
they meant them for. Maybe they meant for a short rack to sit next to an 
animators desk with a dozen Xservers in it?  Connect the top one to a monitor 
and use it as the desktop and run test-renders or maybe some cluster-enabled 
animation package on the rest of the machines? That could definitely be 
usefull for sciviz sort of work. Think real-time fluid dynamics models 
displayed in 3d on the head or CAD stress analysis. Ok, I'll stop the public 
orgy now :)

[ - snip - compairson with sun boxen - snip -]

I understand your point - 8 Netras more powerfull than one Xserver. I could 
find you a few pallets of 486's that would have the same advantage :) (<- 
please note the smiley face!) Colo rack space is expensive - chances are the 
single Xserver will come out cheaper in the long run if you're paying per U 
(that said I haven't actually checked my numbers :). For scientific work 
people will be lusting over them - most problems are not as embarrassingly 
parallel as SETI and don't scale linerally.  More to the point - why would 
anyone buy a Enterprise 220R when they could get 8 netras cheaper - I think 
this more than anything indicates there's a reason to have 1 Xserver over a 2 
or 3 cheaper Netras :) 

Sorry - I didn't mean for that to sound soo, um, preachy. 

For comparison the closest Sun I can manage is a 220R:
(2x) 450mhz Ultrasparc's
2Gb Ram
(2x) 36gb Drive (note that this is the max supported w/o external storage)
(1x) 10/100 built-in ethernet
(2x) GigaSwift ethernet adapters
(2x) UltraSCSI ports
Sun 3year gold support
$28,557

Dell Poweredge 2650
(2x) 1.8ghz Xeon ( someone feel like looking up numbers so I know what CPU to 
compare to 1ghz G4's? I just took the slowest for the lower bound)
2Gb Ram
(4x) 18gb SCSI RAID-5 ( I'm guessing $249/pop is close to the apple 120gig IDE 
drives - trying to be fair here, they are the worst drives you can get)
(2x) Fiber gigE
RedHat linux (This is a comparison of UNIX boxes - most dells probably ship 
with Win2k which I could argue is what should be compaired with OS-X for most 
PHB types who like GUI's - adds a few K, but i didn't argue this so please 
don't hurt me! ;)
3year - 4hr on-sight business hours tech support
RedHat tech support (hey, apple and sun support software too!)
$8691

Loaded Xserver:
(2x) 1ghz G4's
2gb ram
(4x) 120gb RAID (ok, they're IDE, but they're also RAID and much larger so I 
think it's a fair equivalent with the 36 giggers in the 220R)
(2x) GigE (no 10/100 port afaik)
3 year applecare premium ( how sun support stacks up against this I'm not sure 
- the macworld article referenced previously made it sound fairly good)
$8399

So, you could get the Xserver and a small firewire raid array instead of the 
220R. Hm, does anyone actually make a firewire raid array? If not I'd bet 
someone will soon :)

The sun machines have slower CPU's, no gig-e. The sunfire 280r is also more 
expensive (starts at $10k for a much wimpier machine than a Xserver) - I 
picked the 220R because sun's websight seemed to be positioning that as the 
step up from a Netra. I agree that Netra's are nice boxen to be had on the 
cheep, but for a lot of applications I really don't think they're the same 
class of machine. The closer equivalents to a single machine from Sun I think 
shows that the Xserver really is not over priced compaired with other UNIX 
boxes.  

The Dell Box (which was the first box i found that seemed close - maybe 
someone more familiar with the line-up can suggest a better compairson?) was 
picked as I think apple is going to be seeing more competition from Lintel 
and Wintel boxes than Sun ones. Besides, it really indicates what apple was 
looking at when they setup their pricing - I would much rather have an 
Xserver than a Lintel box (that incidental was designed for win2k) in my 
company.

So I'm a hypothetical PHB. What do I see as the best deal - the Apple! I mean, 
Macs are easy to use, unlike that Linux crap (says this hypothetical PHB - 
not me) and way cheaper than Win2k (with it's familiar GUI) and it has the 
engineering / stability of real UNIX boxes like Sun's but without the hefty 
price. 

I really have to say Apple looks to have hit a home run with the Xserver!

-- 

--Nathaniel Grady

   /*\              ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN
   \ /              - AGAINST HTML EMAIL
    X               - AGAINST MS ATTACHMENTS
   / \
------------------------------------------------