Apple upgrades Xserve with G5

Six months after stepping up the performance of its desktop systems, Apple turned its focus to its enterprise products this week, announcing plans to release an updated Xserve with the same G5 processor that has been running its Power Mac PCs since June.

Apple also introduced xGrid, software to make it easier for organizations running compute-intensive applications to harness all of their IT resources by creating an environment in which unused computing capacity on desktops and servers can be tapped as needed.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the products during his keynote Tuesday at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.

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Six months after stepping up the performance of its desktop systems, Apple turned its focus to its enterprise products this week, announcing plans to release an updated Xserve with the same G5 processor that has been running its Power Mac PCs since June.

Apple also introduced xGrid, software to make it easier for organizations running compute-intensive applications to harness all of their IT resources by creating an environment in which unused computing capacity on desktops and servers can be tapped as needed.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the products during his keynote Tuesday at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.

The 1U rack-mounted Xserve G5 system, which is expected to ship in February, will be available with either single or dual 2.0-GHz PowerPC G5 processors. With the PowerPC G5 processor, designed by IBM and Apple, the Xserve will deliver more than 30 gigaflops of processing power, about 60% more than was available on the PowerPC G4-based system, Apple says. The 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor is the same processor used in Virginia Tech’s Power Mac cluster, which has been ranked the third-fastest supercomputer in the world.

The Xserve G5, which uses special cooling technology, is aimed for workloads such as file and print, workgroup management, video streaming, database applications, high-performance computing, and Web and mail serving.

The product ships pre-installed with an unlimited client edition of Mac OS X Server version 10.3 Panther software.

The Xserve will be available in three standard configurations, starting at $3,000 for a single 2.0-GHz PowerPC G5 processor with 512M bytes of PC3200 ECC (Error Correcting Code) RAM. The dual-processor configuration starts at $4,000 with 1G byte of PC3200 ECC RAM. A cluster-optimized dual 2.0-GHz configuration with 512M bytes of RAM and a 10-client license of Mac OS X Server starts at $3,000 per cluster node.