Apple moving iron: #10 server brand

Brian, good comment. BTW, HP's servers are just Compaq Servers re-badged. Instead of Compaq Proliant, they are now HP Proliant.

Also, FWIW...

Acer's Server Page
http://global.acer.com/products/server/index.htm

Hitachi's Server Page
http://www.hitachi.us/Apps/hitachicom/content.jsp?page=index.html&path=jsp/hitachi/forbus/ssg/

Wow. I can't even name 10 companies that make servers. There's IBM, Dell, HP/Compaq (I wonder if they count as 1 or 2 brands?), and... ? I didn't know Hitachi or Acer (Acer?!?!?) made servers, and they're both ahead of Apple. I'd like to see the whole list. cs0875's numbers, showing the top positions, says a lot--the top guys move them in the 100's of thousands; Apple sold 8,700. I think the XServe and OS X Server are great products, but really, in such a top-heavy market, this is barely news. I mean really--ACER?!?!? The guys who make that cheesy Ferrari laptop? Yes, *that* Acer.

I work in a data center that has over 5000 servers in it. Our big players are HP, Sun, IBM, and Dell. Of those, most of our UNIX installs are Solaris on Sun hardware, followed by Linux on HP hardware (although we are looking at the Sun V40z for some of that). IBM has done a great job with getting their AIX system positioned with backbone operations like SAN, Grid, and Mainframe.

For Apple to grow they will 1) Need to come up with an innovative enterprise solution that is best served by Mac OS X. Moving in to a market that is already controlled by one of the big 4 is going ot be next to impossible. Execs don't care about "Great Looks" in the data center. 2)Get flexible with their hardware configurations so that we can use 2U and 4U database and application servers and 1U frontend and web servers.

With that said, I do not have any experience with the XServe's so I do not want to discount them. I'm sure Apple has put a lot of R&D time in to making these great boxes. Not to mention, the small business market is probably fueling a majority of these sales as well.

Being in the top 10 is great, but in an industry that is so top heavy is really isn't going to change things one way or the other. I can't find the exact numbers I found the other day, but the #3 IBM sold I think 253,000 severs. While #1 sold 625,000, that is alot more than Apple. I think it is great the Apple jumped into the top 10, but I am not expecting a climb into the top 5 any time soon. 7th would be nice.

and a 2RU 2 socket box with just 2.5" sas drives along most of the front

we have usb if we need cddvdfloppy(hopefully the last one can die)

Zune spam deleted. Sheesh.

ahhhhhh spam!! and ZUNE SPAM!!!!!!

Have three XServes racked up (one's a dual G4). Three more on the way for remote disaster recovery (darned sarbanes! ;)

Would be interesting to know how many installations comprise that 8,700 servers, how many are nodes and how many are for massive parallel processing installs. 'course pigs'll fly first.

Great Apple...see was that so hard? Deliver a nice OS X server and you'll see solid sales. Now do this.

2U Server, 2 Sockets, minimum 6 hard drive bays. 3 PCI-Express slots.

2U Xserve RAID. iSCSI connection with GigE upgradable to 10g ethernet.

Let's keep this party rolling.

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