by , 9:00 AM EDT, July 11th, 2002
Faster than a speeding Dell. More powerful than bulky Sun. Look! In that Rack! Is it a pizza? Is it cyber road-kill? No! It's Xserve!
When Apple first announced its re-entry into the IT server market, it deferred questions about the performance of the new Xserve until independent benchmarking was completed. The results are in and Apple couldn't be happier. This from Apple's Xserve site:
The benchmarks are in. And the results are impressive -- the following tests compare Xserve against some of the top-selling 1U servers in its class, using the three most critical measures of server performance: processing power, network speed (I/O), and storage throughput.*
Xserve was put to the test against the Dell PowerEdge 1650, the IBM eServer x330 and the Sun Fire V100. The competitive configurations tested have the most comparable feature sets in the 1U server class.
Not all tests were available for all platforms -- depending on the test, the Intel-based servers were configured with either Windows 2000 or Red Hat Linux. The Sun Fire V100 was tested using the Solaris 8 operating system.
Looking a the charts, which we encourage you to do, it is easy to see why Apple is a happy camper. In every test Apple either matched or bested Dell servers, and some of the more familiar UNIX servers from Sun and IBM. It is a very interesting read so do stop by. Note that there is a lot of information, and a number of different benchmarks on the page.