Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » Xserve Xeon review: Pause for photos, answering readers about a final concise review, coming attractions

October 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Xserve Xeon review: Pause for photos, answering readers about a final concise review, coming attractions

TAGS: Servers and storage

Don't go away; we'll be right back.

Turning my notes into a review, and (as you can tell) questioning and validating my findings as I write, is a serious challenge. InfoWorld and other vendors I've put on hold while this proceeds deserve credit for giving me room to take such an unusually deep approach. I'm keeping my head in the work, not checking traffic or comments. However, If you're reading the series and you have an opinion about the content or my approach, please do file a comment. I may not post comments very often--the volume is enormous, and I'm grateful for that--but I read them all and they help set my course.

Much as I'd like to continue to give this my exclusive attention, I do have to see to other things. I have a column to file, and I've been getting requests from readers for photos to go along with this series. That's probably going to fill the day, but I expect to file some more tonight.

So much about Xserve Xeon's engineering is unique that I can't lean on the standard reviewer's shortcut of comparisons with familiar equipment. And unlike other reviews I've written, I find that some of Apple's more unusual design and engineering choices deserve exploration and explanation rather than reportage. So please hang with me. This is a server worth understanding even if only as a yardstick against which other efforts can be measured.

Just so you know what's coming, the next three segments will be:

Power, cooling and noise: The most detailed look I've ever taken at a system's environmental and ergonomic characteristics. A deep dive on Apple's complete rethink on 1U server cooling, how Apple's temperature monitoring and fan control algorithms work, the impact of ambient temperature on operation, power draw and noise at controlled workload levels

Performance: SPEC Java Business Benchmark (SPECjbb), SPECcpu, STREAM, disk I/O and new multi-threaded encryption and compression benchmarks, compared with Xserve G5 and Xserve Xeon running Windows 2003 Server

Networking and virtualization: NFS and SMB (Windows) file sharing, the impact of high peripheral I/O burden on memory-intensive apps (the Intel shared bus test); running Windows 2003 Server as a guest OS under OS X Server using Parallels

It's a lot, but this box deserves all this attention. I really appreciate yours.

Posted by Tom Yager on October 26, 2006 12:12 PM

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