2 loaded up Xserves: http://www.apple.com/xserve/ One is the front-end (web server) another is the backend (database server). They do a lot more than this forum (this forum is probably only about 5-10% of what they do).
Wow, I wasn't aware that Apple is producing such 1U servers. Looks just awesome, and also has a fantastic setup. Pretty cool. Actually I think this is the coolest server I have ever seen, only the old RaQ's can compete with this, at least concering the design. Too bad the budget for my new database server is $750 and not $7,000.
They knock the socks off the RaQs from a design standpoint (and you can't even compare the hardware "horsepower"). I have a RaQ4r and a RaQ550, so I would know.
Well, just had a second look and compared prices, and these Xserve's seem to be unreasonable expensive. Actually totally out of any proportion. You are paying a lot only for the Apple coolness factor here I guess. The new custom build server I'm gonna buy just costs $700 (P4 2,26 GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB HD, CD-ROM, floppy, video onboard) and is pretty much equal in performance to the cheapest Xserver for $3000, it even has CD-ROM drive, video onoard and floppy, which the Xserver doesn't have at all.
Actually when you start pricing stuff in the same class (hardware-wise) as the Xserves, you typically are going to pay twice what the Xserves cost (more-so when you start loading them up). When I was pricing them, for the configuration I wanted, it was about $8,000 per machine, and the cheapest x86 machine I could find with the same specs was pricing out about $17,000. You can't really compare apples to oranges (no pun intended). The Xserves are dual 64-bit processors, dual gigabit ethernet, etc. BTW, the Xserves all come with a DVD drive standard.
Whilst I'm no huge fan of the servers, I just got two 1u dual 64bit (Xeon x86_64), dual gig ethernet servers from Dell for £2000 (~ $3500) each, with 2x300GB SCSI disks and hardware RAID. Looking at the Apple store a similarly specced Xserve would be about $6000 each! I'm assuming you specifically needed OS X for all the Optigold stuff, but from the limited testing I did I found the performance under high load was pretty poor compared to Linux. Of course, the X Serves look far cooler, but once they're in the data centre they're only seen on very rare occasions anyways...
If I know right linux is running on them Anyway the new OSX is based on FreeBSD Kernel (with a lot of improvements of course) ... and free bsd was the best at latency and stuff ... until 2.6 from linux Regards
"Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads." Source: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=7