* News from Apple, Veeam, plus mailbag from reader
Apple recently released a new Xserve server that uses Intel’s dual-core Xeon processor.
Announced at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the Quad Xeon 64-bit Xserve uses Intel’s 2 GHz dual-core Xeon 5100 processor. It has 4MB of L2 cache for performance and features an 80GB Serial ATA disk drive.
The server at 1U high is rack-mountable. It runs Mac OS X Server and is five times as fast as the Xserve G5, according to Apple’s claims. Apple’s Mac OS X Server is included at not extra cost and the operating system supports POP, IMAP mail, ftp, DNS and DHCP.
The server’s storage can be expanded to 2.25TB, while two eight-lane PCI Express slots and dual onboard Gigabit Ethernet adapters come as standard. The quad-core Xserve can also support Serial Attached SCSI drives. The Xserve starts at $3,000.
In other server news, Veeam Software has introduced software to monitor the performance and resource usage of VMware virtual machines. Much like the Windows Task Manager can show performance bottlenecks, the Veeam Monitor combines the results from several virtual machines into a single monitoring console. It lists CPU, memory, disk, network and pagefile results. Veeam Monitor is intended to be used to identify bottlenecks and troubleshoot the virtual machine environment.
Veeam Monitor is available in three versions: Veeam Monitor for VMware Server, Veeam Monitor for VMware Workstation and Veeam Monitor for VMware Workstaton Personal Edition. Interested users can download it here. The version for VMware Server is $200; the VMware Workstation version is $30; and, the VMware Worksation Personal Edition is free.
And finally, from the newsletter mailbag, an e-mail from reader Eric Fisher of Fisher Systems Consulting. He says that the original IBM PC didn’t ship with the operating system included. Fisher says that a number of operating systems existed for the IBM PC – among them PC-DOS, CP/M and P-Systems – and they all shipped at an extra cost to the customer. PC-DOS cost $40, CP/M cost $450 and P-Systems cost $550.
