Originally posted by etoiles
why are xserve's so expensive ? It is basically a stripped down powermac, so why does it cost more ? I know the design might be a bit more tricky because they have to fit averything into a smaller case, but still...
Anybody knows who is actually buying these machines ?
Its not actually a stripped down powermac. Fitting 42 powermacs into a 4 square foot space would be an exercise in a) frustration, and b) using your fire extinguisher. In situations where you have a reasonable number of servers, power and heat management becomes much more critical. Maintenance features like the hot-swap drives are nice, if you're not just doing some NAS like the Xserve RAID -- they're not cheap, either. For performance, I don't believe that the older powermacs had independant HD busses, don't come with dual network cards, etc. Much of the extra price is buying you the unlimited-user copy of OS X Server, too.
One thing that annoys me a little about the design is that there's only a single power supply -- I'd be happier with dual redundant ones. Still, that's a pretty minor defect since for high-availability production use people are still opting for the more solid IBMs, HPs, and Suns. Hopefully the next rev of the hardware will bring it up to a real production level. Even if not, with G5s this will make a very nice, very cheap development server.
-Richard
