Apple announced the immediate availability of updated Xserve models sporting Intel's Nehalem Xeon processors on Tuesday. The new Xserve rack mountable server is availablewith one or two Intel "Nehalem" Xeon Quad Core processors from 2.26 GHz to 2.93 GHz and up to 3TB of storage.

The servers ship standard with 3GB RAM with support for up to 24GB RAM, a 160GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, two independent Gigabit ethernet ports, two FireWire 800 ports, three USB 2.0 ports, an RS-232 port, built-in video with a Mini DisplayPort, and two PCI Express 2.0 x16 expansion slots. It also includes Mac OS X Server 10.5 with unlimited clients, and can take advantage of 15,000 RMP SAS interface hard drives.

Apple gave the world a glimpse of the new Xserve last week when a Web page showing the Nehalem-based servers temporarily appeared on the company's Hong Kong site. The page confirmed that the new Xserve would sport Nehalem processors, but didn't offer many more details. The page was removed shortly after it was posted.

The Nehalem-based Xserve is priced starting at US$2,999.