However, I wasn't quite so fond of all the product's aspects. (All you rabid Apple fans who may be tempted to deluge my inbox with hate mail, note that I am a longtime Intel user who is considering the Xserve for enterprise use.) Unfortunately, the Xserve requires a Macintosh machine for remote management in a graphical environment. You can get in via the console port or telnet/SSH into the machine, but that doesn't connect you with the ease-of-use server features that are the Xserve's main benefit. I also had trouble hooking up the Xserve to our older Cybex KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) equipment. Xserve does not support PS/2 ports, so I had to hook up the keyboard and mouse locally. This was inconvenient but surmountable.
One of the biggest problems I had to overcome using the Xserve--and the iBook Apple sent me to manage the Xserve--was getting used to the fact that there's no hidden setting or control panel. Everything is up front. I spent a lot of time thrashing around in search of things that were right in front of me. Once I realized I was making tasks harder than they had to be, I found the machine wonderfully simple.
U.S.S. Xserve
|
Good
A pleasure to use
Functional and attractive case design Simple software upgrades Bad
No cable management
Macintosh-only remote management Difficult to connect to legacy KVM schemes Vendor Info Apple Xserve, $2,799. Apple Computer, (800) 692-7753. www.apple.com |
The Xserve is a sleek 1U silver rackmount unit with a stylish front panel (see photo below). The front panel features four removable, hot-swappable IDE drives and a fixed CD-ROM drive. There's also a trouble indicator, a machine-identification button, a power button, a locking mechanism for the case, and cool blue activity LEDs similar to those you would see on a 1980s car-stereo amplifier. The machine runs on a pair of Motorola PowerPC G4 chips with 2 MB of DDR (double data rate) Level 3 cache, with the chip core running at 1 GHz.
The main system memory is DDR SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM) with a maximum of 2 GB. The Xserve comes with three PCI slots, two of them functioning at 66 MHz with a 64-bit data path and the other operating at 33 MHz with a 32-bit data path. Apple includes an on-board graphics card and the option of adding a 4x AGP (accelerated graphics port) card for those who want to use the machine in a racked workstation configuration. You also can get an optional Ultra3 SCSI card for external storage devices.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
