Apple continues to raise its profile as an enterprise alternative – check out a story by my colleague John Fontana on the rising corporate interest in Mac software.

And the Apple hardware is just as good. Tom Henderson of Network World’s Lab Alliance reviewed the new Xserve last week. You can check out the full review here (registration required).

Henderson tested the Quad Xeon 64-bit Xserve. It’s not based on Intel’s quad-core Xeon, but rather is a two-socket, dual-core system. The server Henderson ran through his tests was configured above the basic configuration: three Serial Attached SCSI, 697GB disk drives; twin Core-Duo Xeon 5100 CPUs running at 3 GHz; 4GB of DDR2 memory; and a 2-GHz Fibre Cannel Interface card. It was running Mac OS 10.4.8.

The tests showed some great performance improvements in the new Xserve as compared to the Xserve G4. I can’t go into the details here. But complete the free registration and see for yourself.

Apple is hoping its new Intel-based hardware will help put more of its servers in corporate data centers. I’ve spoken with a few Xserve users, who absolutely love their systems. I’m curious if more organizations are starting to look at Apple’s offerings. Is Intel inside making a difference? Let me know.

And in the meantime, also check out our Lab Alliance review of the IBM p5 510Q here. The entry level Power 5+-based server runs AIX or Linux and offers some pretty advanced management and virtualization capabilities. Our reviewer gave the system high marks for performance reliability.

Any systems you’d like to see our reviewers put to the test? E-mail me and let me know which ones.