Comparing Nehalem Xserve to Others
As had been widely expected since the March debut of the new Mac Pros, Apple's Xserve took the Nehalem plunge Tuesday. Specifically, the 1U server now runs on a Xeon 5500 series processor, which features the Nehalem microarchitecture that promises to improve speed by eliminating bottlenecks.
Tue, April 07, 2009
Macworld — As had been widely expected since the March debut of the new Mac Pros, Apple's Xserve took the Nehalem plunge Tuesday. Specifically, the 1U server now runs on a Xeon 5500 series processor, which features the Nehalem microarchitecture that promises to improve speed by eliminating bottlenecks.
The latest Xserve sports a single 2.26GHz Quad Core Xeon processor with 8MB of fully shared L3 cache; the processor has an integrated memory controller with three channels of 1,066MHz DDR3 RAM, while the server offers the option of a 128GB solid-state boot drive.
Apple isn't the only company with 1U servers powered by 5500 CPUs, though; HP and Dell feature similar offerings. So I thought I'd compare the latest Xserve with these other two servers to see if Apple's product remains price-competitive to the other servers in its class.
You said you was high-class...
The "within its class" distinction is important here, because while Apple has a simple line of dedicated server hardware--just the one product--both Dell and HP have far more options falling both above and below the Xserve's price range. So it is entirely possible to get a solid 1U server from Dell or HP for far less than what you'd spend on an Xserve. But is it possible to get an Xserve-equivalent server for far cheaper?
(Oh, and I know, IBM, Sun, and white box Intel are options, but I wanted to keep this comparison simple, and HP/Dell are the most common competitors for Apple in the small-to-midsize-business server space.)
I spec'd out a fairly generic Xserve, going big on CPU and hard drive space. Such a server would be ideal for a company that either doesn't have a lot of external storage, (NAS, SAN, or Direct-Attached RAID) or wants the Xserve to have a lot of space for various reasons. Setting up the Xserve this way also lets me apply a consistent philosophy to the HP and Dell options, even where it was impossible to match specs.
When configuring this Xserve, I didn't add the 128GB SSD boot drive, a US$500 option. I also left out support options, as in the real world, companies are going to have a nigh-infinite amount of options with any of the three companies,--what would be de rigeur for one company would be ridiculous for another.
Finally, all three of my servers come from the Apple, HP, and Dell online stores. I'm well aware of corporate discounts from each of the three companies, but again, in the interests of sanity and the fact that my discounts may not be yours, I left them off completely.
