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Money Where Mouth Isn't (2/11/03)
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One more interesting little tidbit from that Xserve press release: "We were originally looking at a Linux cluster but when Apple announced Xserve, with its promise of great management tools on a UNIX foundation at an affordable price, the decision became easy." Them's the words of assistant professor Michael Giddings at UNC-Chapel Hill. Sadly, them's not the words of Steve Jobs, since, when his other company decided to ditch the Sun servers that had rendered its previous hit movies, the Luxo lads blew off Mac OS X and went with Linux instead. Oh, Steve... how could you?
Granted, Pixar needs some serious "oomph" to crank out all those frames, and according to CNET, they've opted to go with eight Blade servers from RackSaver, each packing 128 2.8 GHz Xeon processors. Even assuming that a 1.33 GHz G4 is on par with a 2.8 GHz Xeon, considering that the same number of G4s in Xserves would take up thirteen racks instead of eight, perhaps it's just a space issue; they couldn't round up any Pixarians willing to help move the sofa bed out of the server room just to make space for an extra five racks.
Or is it the cost? The retail price of the Blade servers appears to come to about $226,000 apiece, for a total of $1,808,000. Meanwhile, 512 dual-processor Xserves spec out to $1,945,088. (Go on, dump 512 of them in your cart at the Apple Store. It's a hoot and a half.) That's a difference of $137 grand, assuming that Steve's employee discount doesn't enter into the picture. Sure, that may not sound like a lot in the context of a big company, but try to think of it this way: $137 big ones buys a whole lotta beer for the company picnic.
The last possibility, of course, is that Steve has a lot less faith in Apple's enterprise server hardware than he might otherwise let on. Hmmm... Isn't it disconcerting when you notice that all the employees of the restaurant at which you're eating are going across the street for lunch?
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SceneLink (3915)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/11/03 episode: February 11, 2003: Dude, you're being arraigned! Dell's ex-ish spokesdork gets busted for buying the Wacky Tobacky. Meanwhile, Apple updates the Xserve and introduces the long-awaited accompanying RAID unit, and Steve's other company ditches its Sun servers-- not for Xserves, but for Intel-based Linux systems...
Other scenes from that episode: 3913: How To Bear The Shame (2/11/03) And we're back once again from yet another irksome hiatus, this latest one involving both the mundane-- looming deadlines, refinancing the mortgage on the AtAT compound-- and the not-so-mundane. Those of you who always complain that Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, never steps in front of the camera will be happy to hear of a meeting in Culver City between our own trivia deity and a certain suave Canadian, where she answered a few questions (or questioned a few answers) to be aired "on another network" on the 29th of May... 3914: Storage Junkies Rejoice (2/11/03) Now, it was obviously completely overshadowed in the Mac world by yesterday's revelation that the Dell Dude got busted for buying drugs, so we felt we should mention it since you probably missed it: Apple just updated the Xserve...
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