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With desktop computer sales still slow globally, Apple introduced its latest product, a server, despite the computer maker's lack of experience in this market. The server announced on Wednesday actually marks Apple's second attempt to enter the server arena following a brief flirtation with the market in the mid 1990's, but at the time the division failed to get off the ground.
The Xserve is a rack-mountable server that will begin selling next month for around USD2,999 in the US. It comes with a 1-gigahertz G4 processor model with 256 megabytes of memory. A dual-processor model with 512 MB of memory costs USD3,999.
The new server, which enters a market jammed with competition from giants like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, is based on the UNIX operating system and follows the launch of Apple's newest desktop operating system, Mac OS X last year.
Other details about the device include its three 66MHz PCI slots -- two of which are 64 bit, the fastest I/O performance ever available in a Mac, according to Apple. The company also said that software RAID mirroring or striping is also available.
In total 480GB of storage is available on four hot-plug ATA/100 drives in the new computer, along with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Xserve also comes with an unlimited user licence for Mac OS X Server software which includes QuickTime Streaming Server, WebObjects, and updates to Apache, Samba, PHP, MySQL and Tomcat.
"Xserve is the result of listening to our customers," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive officer. Jobs went on to say that the cost would be the real selling point of the server and he highlighted the unlimited-user software licence.
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