Apple Ships Xserve G5 Server

Apple Computer Tuesday announced it has begun shipping its Xserve G5, the company's most powerful Xserve to date.

According to Apple, the Xserve G5 provides more than 30 gigaflops of processing power per system, roughly 60 percent more than the PowerPC G4-based Xserve -- in a 1U rack-mount enclosure.

"The single processor 2.0-GHz Xserve G5 servers are available now," said Douglas Brooks, product manager server hardware at Apple, "with the dual-processor version becoming available in April."

Apple has also introduced the Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics, a turnkey computing cluster. "One area of traction for us has been in cluster computing," Brooks said. He added that the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior at Princeton University recently purchased a 64-node Xserve G5 cluster.

Brooks said that Apple has been working toward eliminating the perception that Apple products, particularly Apple servers, are more expensive than the competition's. He asserted that an Xserve G5 running Red Hat, when compared with a similarly configured Dell PowerEdge, costs roughly $2,000 less.The three standard Xserve G5 configurations include: