Xserve

Technology

As your business grows and the workload increases, so can Xserve. Scale up to 8 cores for a dramatic boost in processor performance. Scale out across multiple units for seemingly infinite possibilities. You can configure your system for a broad range of applications and tune Xserve to your specific requirements.

Fine-tuned and fully charged.

Tack on even more power and tackle your most demanding applications. The Xserve supports quad-core or 8-core processor performance up to 3.0GHz and up to 32GB of fast 800MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM (fully buffered DIMM) memory.

Room for more.

New 1TB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives pack up to 3TB in a 1U form. Or get up to 900GB of internal storage with the 15,000-rpm Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives and enjoy the highest performance available today. They deliver higher sequential performance (up to 125MB/s), outstanding random-access performance, and best-in-class Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) ratings for the most demanding applications.

Optional hardware RAID.

For enhanced data protection and performance up to 325MB/s,¹ the optional Xserve RAID Card provides hardware RAID 0, 1, and 5 with 256MB of cache and a 72-hour battery backup. You can trust Xserve to deliver the ultimate reliability for critical server environments.

PCI Express 2.0 expansion.

Xserve provides two open PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots, one x16 and one x8, with up to four times the bandwidth of the previous Xserve. One slot can be configured as a PCI-X slot to work with PCI-X expansion cards, allowing you to preserve your investment in expensive or custom I/O cards and devices. These expansion slots provide the bandwidth needed for the latest Apple and third-party I/O cards, such as dual- and quad-port 4Gb Fibre Channel cards and 10Gb Ethernet adapters.

Built-in graphics.

Thanks to built-in graphics, it’s easy to manage your system using a keyboard, mouse, and display, without taking a valuable expansion slot. The 2D/3D acceleration of the GPU enhances rendering and video processing, a valuable feature for Apple’s professional applications. A mini-DVI output makes it possible to drive up to a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, and the included VGA adapter supports connection to standard VGA devices and KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switches.

Testing conducted by Apple in December 2007 using preproduction 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon-based Xserve units configured with Xserve RAID Card. Testing conducted using Iometer 2006.07.27 with a 30-second ramp-up, 5-minute run duration, 512KB request size, 4 outstanding IOs, and using non-OS-cached reads and writes. System configured with the operating system and test volume on a single RAID volume. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Xserve RAID Card.