Xserve

The Xserve was a server from Apple, which was designed for installation in a 19 "rack. He was not sold with the normal operating system Mac OS X, but with Mac OS X Server.

Development

The first Xserve was introduced in May 2002. In March 2003, Apple introduced the Xserve cluster nodes that have only a single hard disk and are not equipped with video cards or optical drives. Some of the fastest supercomputers in the world were Xserve cluster. As the highest -placed system installation at Virginia Tech reached the seventh place in the TOP500 list of November 2004.

2004, the Xserve G5 was introduced, which has one or two type processors PowerPC 970 running at 2 GHz. For reasons of heat dissipation only 3 hard drives can be installed in it. The place for the fourth hard disk is required for ventilation. Between January 2005 and August 2006, the dual-processor Xserve shipped with a CPU clock speed of 2.3 GHz. At WWDC 2006 in San Francisco on August 7, 2006, the new Xserve was introduced with Intel processors. In October 2006, the Xserve came with a up to 3 GHz strong quad-core 64-bit " Woodcrest" Xeon processor from Intel. According to Apple, they were up to 5 times faster than the old server with G5 processor.

The Xserve supported up to three SATA and SAS drives and a maximum internal storage capacity of up to 2.25 TB. In addition, he had two PCI - Express slots with 8 lanes and two Gigabit Ethernet ports that enable simultaneous connection to multiple networks. As with the Xserve G5 internal Combo drive was installed. The 256 -bit memory controller with a bandwidth of up to 21.3 GB / sec. supports up to 32 GB DDR2 memory at 667 MHz.

Optional could be acquired an Xserve with redundant power supply. This is an important criterion for suitability for industrial applications, eg in the area of process control systems, which must have a very high availability. The Xserve is often used as a metadata controller within an Xsan environment in conjunction with one or more Xserve RAID. The Xserve G5 Cluster Nodes can be found very often in render farms to offload and accelerate the computing power in the field of video editing, compositing and 3D.

The production of the Xserve was discontinued on January 31, 2011.

List of Xserve models

Xserve PowerPC G4 processors

• Xserve G4
• Xserve G4 Cluster Node

Xserve PowerPC G5 processors

• Xserve G5 ( 1 x 2 GHz or 2 x 2 to 2.3 GHz PPC G5)
• Xserve G5 Cluster Node ( 2 x 2 to 2.3 GHz PPC G5)

Xserve with Intel Xeon Core Duo processors

• Xserve (2 x 2 GHz, 2.66 GHz and 2 x 2 x 3 GHz)

Xserve with Intel Xeon 8-core technology

• Up to 32 GB of RAM and 4 TB hard disk