The product was expected. The stylishness wasn't.
Today
Apple Computer announced the development and production of its new 1U rackmountable server system, called the
Xserve. The Xserve is not only Apple's first serious foray into the big-iron server market, but they've also produced the first dual-CPU RISC server in a 1U profile. Definitely some serious power in a small package.
And what a package it is...(From Apple's Xserve
design page)
Hot-swappable IDE drives, plenty of LED status indicators (Those CPU utilization indicators are BLUE LEDs, for you casemod freaks out there), first-time support for DDR SDRAM (Up to 2 GB), Gigabit Ethernet onboard, front/rear FireWire ports, USB, and even a serial port for console connections in emergencies. The system is ideally suited for clustering, with each processor in a 1U configuration providing 7.5 gigaflops of calculation power. Since the 1U units are dual-processor capable, and the largest industry-standard rack has a 42U capacity, that makes for a whopping 630 gigaflop output per rack.
While the system is rack-mountable, it's also an ideal workstation that meets/beats the power of many of the current PowerMac G4 workstations. Available with a Radeon 8500 and two 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots, the Xserve is also ideal for an A/V workstation, or a RAID controller. Apple will also soon be releasing a 3U RAID drivebay addon for the Xserve which will add a Fibre Channel backbone for this already powerful system.
As they say on Slashdot...Yes...I can definitely imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...