I n a Federal Computer Weekly article about the new Army Xserve supercomputer cluster, an exec with Colsa, the company building the cluster, says that Appleis Xserve is a superior computer. In the same article, an analyst with Illuminata, Inc. is quoted as saying that "Apple has decided to get fairly serious with servers." Those are bright words of praise for Apple in a market the company has heretofore not found neither success, nor respect. From the article:
"They were never really a very serious server player," said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. "They had a fling with Unix a few years back, but that never went anywhere. The basic [Apple Macintosh operating system] was designed with desktops in mind."
"Apple has decided to get fairly serious with servers," Haff said. "Xserve is a serious product line within Apple. Theyive brought in people with real server expertise."
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However, the Xserve is a superior server, said Anthony DiRenzo, executive vice president of Colsa. He chose Appleis product based on its performance, power requirements and cost, he said, adding that one key element in his decision was the systemis low power consumption.
"We put these clusters into production for a user who uses it all day and all night," DiRenzo said. "This thing needs to be up, it needs to be stable, it needs to be online."
The cluster in question is the largest announced supercomputing product that is being built from Macs. The system will use 1,566 dual-processor Xserve G5s, and is expected to be one of the top five supercomputers in the world. That kind of performance, according to analysts TMO spoke with last month, has lead to Apple making inroads into government contracts such as the Army project.
Thereis more information on the Colsa project in the Federal Computer Weekly article.