What could inspire Tom Yager to give up his day, (night, and weekend) job at InfoWorld to enter the PC server business? No, that isn't a question in this week's News Quiz, it's from a review of Apple's latest Xserve, the eight-core Harpertown.

"While Apple's latest Xserve uses the Intel Harpertown quad-core, Core 2 Xeon CPU, it is in all other regards the glorious antithesis of a PC server.... Xserve is built and supported to run not for one or two years, but three years, five years, and beyond. If you think I'm having you on, try to find a bargain Xserve on the refurbished market.

"The pleasant surprise is the price of a fully loaded Xserve. Harpertown Xserve with eight 3GHz cores, 3TB of internal hardware RAID storage, and 32GB of RAM cruises in at under $10,000. There are 1U x86 rack servers with smaller price tags, to be sure, but none that can be taken so far in one chassis as Xserve for the money, and no PC server carries pervasive big iron design to the mainstream as Xserve does."

Want to hear more? Read the full review.

Posted by Caroline Craig on May 6, 2008 07:06 AM