SCOffice Mail Server

Apple’s foray into server-class products started in the late ‘80s, but

they never quite managed to make a big dent in the server market. Things might,

however, change with the Xserv.

How? We took an in-depth look at the product in our labs. Being a

rack-mountable server, it can be used for a range of applications right from

entry-level to high-end.

Xserve comes in three flavors: single processor, dual processor and a cluster

node configuration.

The processor(s) used is the 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 with 256 KB KL2 cache and

interestingly 2 MB DDR based L3 cache (per processor) for optimizing

multitasking performance. And OS? Of course, it’s the Mac OS X 10.2 server.

The main memory can be scaled up to 2 GB, which is 333 MHz DDR SDRAM. Xserve

also comes standard with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB ports and three

FireWire ports. It has three PCI slots, two of which are 64-bit, 66 MHz, and one

is a regular half-length 32-bit AGP cum PCI slot.

One 64-bit slot is already taken up with an Ethernet card. Interestingly, the

server doesn’t come with a graphics card, keyboard, mouse or monitor. These

are optional and have to be purchased separately if needed.

Xserve also sports four hot pluggable IDE drive bays that can take up to 720

GB of hard disks (four drives of 180 GB each). Interestingly, these are all IDE

drives, meaning there’s no SCSI. There might be two reasons for doing this.

One, of course, is the lower cost for IDE. Second could be the way IDE has

been configured on the server. The drives are connected via four independent 133

MHz buses, which can support 180 GB ATA/100 or 60 GB ATA/133 hard drives.

Therefore, the peak throughput from these four channels is 400 MB/s. This is

higher than using SCSI drives, which are daisy chained (shared) on to a single

channel of 160 MB/s (for example, in case of UltraSCSI 160).

The OS supports software RAID (level 0 or 1), and a separate RAID module is

also available. We got a dual processor Xserve with 512 MB DDR RAM and a single

60 GB hard disk for review. The design is sleek and robust, packing everything

into a 1U (1.73 inches) form factor. Its surface area is large measuring 71x44

cm and the server weights 11 kgs.

Xserve can be opened or rather its cover can be slid off without using a

screwdriver. The server has several LEDs on its front panel and the prominent

ones are for CPU usage, network usage, and drive status. An Allen key based lock

is provided to avoid accidental removal of the hot pluggable drives.

Coming to the software, the most lucrative fact about the OS is that it has

an unlimited client license. So you can have as many users accounts on it as you

want without paying anything extra, making it a very cost-effective option.

Since the OS is based on BSD UNIX, it gets some inherent advantages like an

existing developer base and the multitasking qualities of Unix.

While traditional UNIX systems are notorious for their incomprehensible

interface, Apple has given its OS an excellent graphical user interface (Aqua

interface), making it very administrator-friendly.

The OS has all the essential software and services needed for a network. So,

it can be set up as file/print, Web, proxy, DNS/DHCP, e-mail, database (mySQL),

and much more. It provides out-of-the-box support for heterogeneous networks,

having connectivity options for Unix (NFS), Windows (SMB), and Macintosh (AFP)

file services. For Web it has Apache Web server, Tomcat application server, Perl

and PHP. FTP is also present with on the fly compression.

POP and IMAP built in support will make any administrator smile. It also

comes with Apple’s QuickTime streaming server, making it a choice for audio

and video streaming. One drawback though is its basic firewall. The OS also

works with any LDAP v3 directory server, and has a built-in Open Directory

Server. This enables it to authenticate against a Windows 2000 server with

Active Directory.

The administration can be done in three ways: directly, remotely and through

a serial port. It even has a terminal for those die-hard Unix fans who’d

rather die than use a GUI. Xserve is basically designed to run in a headless

environment, and is therefore supported by remote-management utilities like

Server Monitor and Server Setting. One drawback we felt here was that they only

run from a Mac OS X client.

Ideally, one should be able to manage the Xserve even from Windows clients.

Nevertheless, these features are quite feature rich, and you can in fact toggle

a system identifier light from Server Monitor to identify a particular Xserve

server, in case you’re running more than one.

On the user management front, you don’t need to create different user

accounts for different services. One user account can be given access to

file/print, Web services, etc. One feature specific to OS X clients is caching

of user settings locally, which doesn’t disrupt the network operation and

security policies even when the server is down.

Interestingly, Xserve also comes with a developer’s suite CD for developing

Carbon-based (MAC OS X) applications, and gcc 3.1 is the default compiler.

Developer’s tools may seem a misfit on a server class machine, but it’s

always nice to have your development stuff around in some corner.

The Bottom Line: The USP of this product seems to be the unlimited client

license, making Xserve an extremely cost-effective solution to some competing

products, except, of course, Linux. Add to that an excellent GUI and

cross-platform interconnectivity, which make it a good choice for any

organization. Finally, if you’re interested in migrating from another OS, say

Windows 2000, to this platform, then there are third-party tools available for

the job.