In a Federal Computer Weekly article about the new Army Xserve supercomputer cluster, an exec with Colsa, the company building the cluster, says that Apple’s Xserve is a superior computer. In the same article, an analyst with Illuminata, Inc. is quoted as saying that "Apple has decided to get fairly serious with servers." Those are bright words of praise for Apple in a market the company has heretofore not found neither success, nor respect. From the article:
"They were never really a very serious server player," said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. "They had a fling with Unix a few years back, but that never went anywhere. The basic [Apple Macintosh operating system] was designed with desktops in mind."
"Apple has decided to get fairly serious with servers," Haff said. "Xserve is a serious product line within Apple. They’ve brought in people with real server expertise."
[…]
However, the Xserve is a superior server, said Anthony DiRenzo, executive vice president of Colsa. He chose Apple’s product based on its performance, power requirements and cost, he said, adding that one key element in his decision was the system’s low power consumption.
"We put these clusters into production for a user who uses it all day and all night," DiRenzo said. "This thing needs to be up, it needs to be stable, it needs to be online."
The cluster in question is the largest announced supercomputing product that is being built from Macs. The system will use 1,566 dual-processor Xserve G5s, and is expected to be one of the top five supercomputers in the world. That kind of performance, according to analysts TMO spoke with last month, has lead to Apple making inroads into government contracts such as the Army project.
There’s more information on the Colsa project in the Federal Computer Weekly article.
The Mac Observer Spin:
When was the last time a Suit pronounced the Mac as being a "superior server?" How about an analyst heaping praise on Apple on anything relating to IT? As we have said for some time, Apple’s quiet efforts to gain entry into the IT field is showing results (despite the company’s lack of any marketing in that field).
These supercomputing clusters definitely aren’t the same thing as a network of iMacs or eMacs at a Fortune 500 company, but there are many, many uses for clusters in the corporate world, too (mainly in modeling, such as financial and economic modeling). Above and beyond that, however, success in this field shows IT folks everywhere that the Mac works as a server, and that it is cheaper to purchase and maintain than competing solutions. Someone will notice that at some point.
In the meanwhile, this is great press for Apple.