Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » WWDC predictions: Servers and storage

July 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

WWDC predictions: Servers and storage

TAGS: Servers and storage

Now that eMac has been plowed under to make room for 17-inch Intel iMacs' foray into education, Apple is down to two PowerPC Macs, both targeted at the high end of Apple's market: Power Mac G5 Quad and Xserve G5. I hope you don't feel attached to either of them, because they're about to go bye-bye. The order of execution is somewhat in doubt, but my vote is that the last of the PowerPCs will be get disappeared in one ceremony. First, I'll address Xserve and its cohort, Xserve RAID.

I don't see PowerPC Xserve surviving the WWDC keynote. The WWDC program trumpets server admin sessions, and there's little point in covering that ground for a machine wasting away from design neglect. Xserve G5 was so far behind state-of-the-market last Fall that I asked Apple whether its interest in IT was waning. I now consider the matter settled in favor of IT, academia and high-performance computing.

Apple's going to hand us a Xeon 5100 Series (Woodcrest) dual socket, quad-core Xserve, keeping the Xserve name because it doesn't have "Power" in it. I expect the Intel Xserve will keep its chassis, too, because it works. The only thing I'd do is trade the front panel FireWire port for a USB 2.0 port. Inside, though, there's no part of Xserve G5 that's salvageable. The PCI-X bus, DDR memory, slow bus, single-core CPUs and complete lack of out-of-band remote management capabilities put Xserve at an insurmountable disadvantage relative to every dual-socket x86 rack server on the market, even models well below Xserve's price class. If Apple wants to keep charging comparatively elite prices for Xserve, it'll have to rewrite the box's specs from scratch. Of course, Apple started doing that the moment Xserve G5's engineering was idled, so Intel Xserve should show no signs of being hurried to market.

The Xeon 5100 Series platform (with the 5000P chipset) is nothing special out of the box compared to Intel's previous, beefy high-end server platforms. Let's say that Intel left Apple lots of room to design differentiation into Xserve, and Xserve needs it; Apple's wading into a grossly overcrowded market. One third-tier vendor/supplier, SuperMicro, rolled out 30+ server models based on Xeon 5100 Series the day the CPUs launched. $2,000 quad-core Woodcrest rackmounts are as numerous as mosquitos. Meaningful differentiation from the pack is the only way Apple can maintain Xserve's comparatively elite pricing.

Apple never admits to having unhappy customers, but I know that the #1 complaint about Xserve G5 was its lack of lights-out/out-of-band remote management. Having Xserve be completely invisible to the LAN until the OS boots and initializes fully presumes that the system will never crash, hang or fail to boot. I think Apple will spring for a baseboard management controller (BMC) that at least supports Intelligent Platform Management Interface 2.0. A BMC gives administrators emergency access to machines that won't boot or which, say, can't bring up their network links because of IP address conflicts. The BMC runs independently, so no matter what fails (other than the power supply), it'll always answer your call on the LAN or, failing that, the serial port. IPMI is almost ubiquitous in Woodcrest servers, but Apple has a strong software advantage. System makers' IPMI tools are generally so clunky that the feature goes unused. Apple can bake a bit of fresh Java for its GUI remote server administration tools and crawl through the basement window of any Xserve. Ditto for Remote Desktop.

As for networking, I'm about 90 percent confident that Xserve will have at least one 10 GbE copper port on board. 10 GbE switches are expensive right now, $600-$900 per port according to InfoWorld storage guru Mario Apicella. But copper (as opposed to fiber) controller chips are quite affordable. Switch prices are plummeting--the cost was over $10,000/port not long ago--and thinking back on 802.11g (Airport Extreme) and gigabit Ethernet, Apple likes to be out in front with network standards. I'm 100 percent certain of Apple-branded 10 GbE cards for Apple's servers and workstations.

Xserve's server-attached storage will be SATA 2. If Apple doesn't make the drive trays compatible with Xserve G5, it'll have some explaining to do. SATA 2 is backward-compatible with the original SATA used in Xserve G5.

The Xserve applause bait will be Steve's demo of Windows 2003 Server hosted under OS X. He will do the same with Vista when he gets to the workstation, but I hope he does Xserve first. I will attest that it works perfectly on my MacBook Pro. Parallels has an Enterprise Edition coming before the end of the year, and I believe it'll guest 64-bit OSes on 64-bit hosts. Whether Apple wants to celebrate it or not, Windows and Linux will run as well-contained, user mode guests of Apple's server OS. I think Apple will make a fuss about it at WWDC.

What of Xserve RAID? Can Apple leave it alone and just bump up its capacity as drives get denser? Here again, not if it wants to maintain its current price level. Now that 300 MB/second SATA 2 is available, the 133 MB/second parallel ATA used in the current Xserve RAID is outclassed, and PATA components will eventually get scarce. I'm about 95 percent sure that SATA 2 will be the drive bus of choice for Xserve RAID.

My 90 percent prediction is that the network transfer interface to Xserve RAID will get upgraded to 10 GbE iSCSI. iSCSI is SCSI over IP, which makes an Ethernet-connected storage device look like it's hanging from a plain old SCSI controller. Administrators will appreciate being able to plug Xserve RAID into their 10 gigabit switches. I haven't verified this, but I'm told that organizations that can't afford 10 GbE switches can go port-to-port (server direct to Xserve RAID with no switch) using copper cable. The only question in my mind is how many 10 GbE ports they'll put on Xserve RAID, because Ethernet trunks beautifully: You can bind multiple physical interfaces into one much faster logical interface, and you can keep going until you run out of either ports or cables. Apple could do Xserve RAID with fiber 10 GbE, but Mario tells me that over the short runs common to server rooms, there's no substantial performance difference between copper and fiber. If Apple requires that Xserve RAID customers go out and buy 10 GbE fiber switches ($$$$), it'll find Xserve RAID a hard sell. Those who can afford 10GbE fiber switches won't be shopping for sub-$15,000 storage arrays.

I predict 60 percent probability that Apple will license the code from ADIC that allows Xsan to host non-HFS (e.g. Windows, Linux) filesystems. ADIC sells it separately, but practically nobody, even inside ADIC, knows about it or can figure out how to buy it. As a result, the market for Xsan is much smaller than it could be given the quality of the solution.

Just for fun, a couple of parting long shots: It'd be fun if Apple offered a tiny removable external hard drive for Mac clients, based on 2.5-inch, 1.8 or 1-inch drives that are planted into drive cartridges. My desire for this was born when I tried to squeeze Final Cut Express HD and Garage Band with all of the Jam Packs together on one 100 GB MacBook Pro drive. "Jam Pack" indeed. I'd also like to see Apple sell OS X Server for non-Mac x86 servers. With Windows and commercial Linux as alternatives, I'd pay $999 for an unlimited OS X Server license in a bllink, and I wouldn't be in this dinky minority of people who know how powerful Apple's server software is. Lock the thing down with a USB dongle; server customers won't complain about that any more than Pro Apps users do. Apple, go after the seats. Your client OS isn't worth the trouble of trying to protect for use on non-Macs, but Server can be protected and it is worth it. Installed base is everything.

Thanks for hanging in with this long post. More soon.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 25, 2006 04:20 PM

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