New Apple Xserves offer additional SSD bay

Today's Xserve release was pretty much on par with what you'd expect. Upgraded Nehalem processor, faster bus, etc. Yes, it is way faster but that isn't the most important difference...

The speed improvements, which Apple says might be twice as fast, will be very beneficial to those using the Xserves as an Apple Mail/ iCal server and third party mail servers like Kerio and Communigate Pro. Also, those running web applications on the Xserve, especially database intensive ones, should see noticeable performance improvements. Finally, scientific, Final Cut Video Servers and XGrid deployments should see noticably better performance.

But the majority of Xserve deployments, at least in my narrow experience, are company file servers that run AFP, SMB, NFS, plus some DNS, Open Directory, flat websites and other small applications. These don't tax the current processor or memory architecture that much. Those uses are more about storage limitations.

Apple does has a gift for us there too, though.

Apple now offers a $500 2.5 inch, 128 GB Solid State Drive (SSD) option. Using this option should save your company something close to the $500 drive cost over the life of the Xserve. Additionally, you could opt to buy a 64GB third party drive (Unsupported by Apple and generally not recommended for live environments) and install it yourself for much less. Apple states:

Solid-state of the art.

A new 128GB solid-state drive option provides an ultra-fast, low-power boot drive alternative.1 Operating at under 1 watt — versus 12 to 18 watts for a typical spinning drive — this solid-state drive delivers random-access performance that’s up to 20x faster than a SAS drive and up to 48x faster than a SATA drive.2 All with read and write performance that’s about the same as a typical 3.5-inch SATA drive. And since this 1.8-inch drive is installed in a dedicated location, it doesn’t take up a valuable drive bay, leaving all three bays available for primary storage and RAID applications.

Also very importantly, this frees up a drive space for more storage. That means internally you can have three 1TB drives.

(really Apple? no 1.5 or 2TB drive options? Someone is asleep at the wheel here)

Also, questionably, Apple put its new Mini DisplayPort on the back of this thing. How many people will have Mini DisplayPort KVMs in their server room? How many will within 2 years? My guess is zero. Apple's Mini has a Mini-DVI, why not Xserve? Also, the Mini DisplayPort to VGA/DVI cable is extra. What percentage of people will need this "option"? 100%

Also, why such a burly video card on a server? My only thinking on this is that it could be OpenCL in Snow Leopard related.

Overall, this new Xserve is a great update for Apple server rooms everywhere. Apple made a great leap by including the new SSD drive option, it would have been another great step to offer 2TB drive options.