I've been doing some consulting work for a client for the past month or so. They run their office's (many remote users) entirely on Apple hardware, servers and all. Part of the deal we struck was that i would receive the old hardware as a partial payment. I kind of have a thing for collecting apple hardware, so they were lucky in that respect. 48TB of shared storage, 48GB of RAM per server, dual 2.93GHz quad core Xeon's in each server. It will be fun to play with, not sure what i will end up doing with it. I will probrably end up hosting a bunch of VM's on them.
That kind of hardware for a month's worth of work? And it's only part of your fee? You must be in high demand... Good for you! :encouragement:
Actually it's not as much as you would think. XServe prices tanked after apple killed the product line. I've actually thought about buying some of these before, they are quite powerful and can be easily found for under a grand on ebay. Install parallels server and Xsan, and you have virtual machines working effortlessly and shared storage. Or if you really hate Mac OS you can install ESXi, the Xserve is a supported platform.
Can't say I've worked on apple much but am loving the amount of storage. I plan to build a custom storage pool one of these days.
It depends on the configuration, but i've seen them go for as low as $400. Thats pretty cheap considering what the Dell equivalent goes for. This model will run any version of OS X as long as it's snow leopard or later Not feasibly
Loved the Xserve line (past the leafblower G4 Xserves), primarily due to looks. It was well executed and matched the rest of the G5/Aluminum motif. One of these days I'll finally be able to handle one. One of these days...
