Xserve review

If you want a Mac OS X server and have a rack to put it in, then the Xserve is an excellent box. It would be nice to see some of the technologies in more office-friendly packaging.

Apple has once again decided to enter the purpose-built server market, this time with a 1U high rack mount server. For its size, the specification of the machine is very good. It comes with one or two 1GHz G4 processors with up to 2G of DDR SDRAM. There are four hard drive bays, each bay capable of holding either a 60G or 120G 7200 rpm Ultra ATA/100 hard drive. These hard drive bays support hot swapping, which means that, if appropriate, a hard drive can be replaced while the machine is running - provided suitable software precautions have been taken to ensure that the drive is not in use.

The machine also contains as standard two 66MHz PCI, a CD-ROM drive, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, three FireWire ports, two USB ports, an ATI PCI graphics card and a DB-9 serial port. All of this is fitted into a 1U (or if you prefer 1.75-inch) high box which is designed to fit into a standard 19-inch wide equipment rack. However, beware that the machine is 28 inches deep which may not fit in every rack, and if you have a wider rack then you will need a shelf. The other thing to be aware of if you buy any 1U is that they are very, very noisy as they require powerful blowers to push air through a narrow space to cool them. The Xserve is no exception to this and you should probably not consider purchasing unless you can house it in a rack away from where people are working.

The Xserve ships with all the parts you need for either a four-pole or two-pole rack. However, it does mount slightly differently to other machines. Usually, rails are mounted in the rack and the machine slides in and out on the rails. For the Xserve, the machine's case is bolted to the racks and then the motherboard can slide in and out of the case. The machine ships with a cable management arm which allows the cables to move in and out with the motherboard. In principle, the machine should be serviceable by an end user, and Apple does sell a parts kit which includes a logic board, power supply, blower and hard drive module. Apple uniquely offers, at extra cost, an on-site hardware repair service that guarantees a four-hour response during working hours and next day out of hours - usually referred to as 8x5x4 - but not a 24x7 hardware response.

Light hearted
Once the machine is installed in a rack and powered up, it provides an entertaining light show which gives front panel indication of most operations, including a bar chart display showing CPU activity separately for both processors. From startup, the Xserve is simple to configure either locally or remotely. It can be booted from the pre-installed copy of Mac OS X Server, from where configuration can be completed, or it can be booted from the CD-ROM to allow more advanced configuration. If your machine has more than one disk drive then there will be a temptation to install some form of RAID setup on the drives. Mac OS X supports striping for both RAID 0 for speed and RAID 1 for reliability. Unlike other machines, the Xserve can boot from both of these types of volumes. There remains no support for striping+mirroring (RAID 0+1) or RAID 5 and there is no automatic hot spare support for mirroring which would allow the OS to automatically rebuild a mirror if a drive fails.

All the major components of Mac OS X Server can be configured via the management software. This is very extensive and allows user-friendly configuration of the major systems such as mail, file sharing, printer configuration and Web serving without resorting to text editors and command lines. It is possible to browse the various log files and look for problems. There is also an excellent server monitor application which allows an administrator to monitor a number of Xserve's hardware components to check, for example, disks, power supplies and system temperatures. Mac OS X Server offers a great number of services in a nice, easy-to-configure package.