Asia’s server market is dominated by deeply entrenched brand names such as Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, but there is room for a newcomer like Apple, said Albert Lam, Apple’s South Asia managing director at a media briefing.
The Xserve is Apple’s first rack-mounted server. It uses only one unit of rack space and runs the Unix-based Mac OS X operating system.
Singapore-based IT services company Frontline Technologies Corp will be reselling the Xserve in Asia. Cheong Yen Niap, Frontline’s managing director, said that despite the Xserve’s late start, there were spaces it could compete in.
He named Asia’s growing life sciences and biotech fields as potential markets, where molecular modelling and number-crunching computers will be in demand.
As Mac OS X is based on Unix, the most common large server operating system, he believed that Unix administrators would find the interface familiar.
Apple is confident the Xserve’s price and performance will be another compelling factor for companies to snap up the machine.
As an example, an Xserve with dual PowerPC 1GHz processors with 512MB of memory, dual gigabit Ethernet and 480GB of storage will cost US$5,646.
It’s closest competitor is a US$6,025 IBM xSeries 330 with dual Intel Pentium III processors, 512MB, 146GB storage, running the open-source Linux OS. A Dell PowerEdge 1650 with dual 1.4GHz Pentium III chips, 512MB, 146GB will cost US$7,496---with the catch that at that price, only 25 clients are allowed to connect to its Windows 2000 operating system.
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