Apple Xserve – An Introduction

By | January 10, 2005 | Open Source

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My latest column on the Apple Xserve is up. The Xserve has been a bright spot in Apple’s more recent enterprise movements since 2002.

In combination with the anticipated release of Tiger this year (the next iteration of OS X) the combo of hardware and software will certainly keep this solution on competitor radars.

With IBM firmly entrenched on the PowerPC architecture – more and more Linux and UNIX solutions are becoming mainstream on this platform. This will only give more edge to Apple and reduce resistance from potential adopter technicians.

Written By:

Blane Warrene

Blane is a writer and researcher focusing on Apple and Open Source technologies. Prior to this, he helped found a commercial software and consulting venture, and worked in the financial services sector as a director of technology and in varying technical roles. Blane maintains Open Sourcery: SitePoint's Open Source Blog.

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{ 4 comments }

Anonymous May 9, 2011 at 2:16 am

commenting on this here post

Chris Eidhof January 11, 2005 at 6:36 am

Thanks for clearing that up, I’m just someone who thought Apple was a closed-source company :)

bwarrene January 10, 2005 at 1:08 pm

By default it is all about open source when the toolset they provide is largely an open source platform, including the kernel of their operating system (Darwin).

I have found the Apple platform to be a rich open source environment – especially coming from a BSD Unix atmosphere. It also has allowed me to leverage the less costly tools for SAN’s (Apple kills the competition on storage area networks in the terabyte ranges). Not too mention I have been developing on the desktop side from a Mac since 1998.

Probably one of the big obstacles for Apple to overcome is lack of visibility regarding the rich relationship they have with the open source community.

Additionally, on the multimedia side of things – with QuickTime being adopted into international standards such as 3GPP/3GPP2 and H.264 for HD video encoding and streaming – it is also about open standards – something open source (especially Linux) is all about (though the source of QT is not open).

Finally, with IBM focusing literally the majority of their resources on Linux on the PowerPC platform, it now appears very insightful that Apple brought OS X (and the underlying Darwin) and products such as the Xserve to the IBM Power platform.

Chris Eidhof January 10, 2005 at 10:59 am

It’s a good and interesting article, but it doesn’t have very much to do with open source, does it? At least not more than a Linux-webserver, or am I overlooking something?

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