The Xserve and the elusive Web hosting market

Apple is shipping its new Quad Xeon 64-bit Xserve this October - the company hopes the move will give it a larger share of the PC-dominated Web hosting market.

Apple’s new servers
This week, Apple announced the new Intel-based Xserve, which is advertised as five times faster than the previous G5-powered editions. The 1U rack-mountable server also includes a smaller Intel Xeon processor, less required cooling, redundant power supplies, and up to 2TB of storage – a package that may make it hard for Web hosts to resist.

“With the new Intel Xeon chips - and given the base price of the new Xserve, they’ve become competitive again,” said Randall Perry, owner of sysTame Apple Consulting based in Orlando, Florida. Perry has been an Apple consultant with sysTame for ten years and an Apple Web host since 2002.

A small piece of the Web hosting pie
Since its first serious foray into the server market four years ago, the Apple Xserve has held only a marginal position in the Web hosting arena. According to a controversial 2005 article that ran in Anandtech, an online hardware analysis magazine, the Xserve’s old G5 processors simply couldn’t keep up with the competition. “They were behind in speed in comparison to Intel servers, but also in comparison to the top-of-the-line quad processor Powermacs,” said Perry.

Apple won’t disclose its share of the server market, but in North America, less than five per cent of end users are running Mac desktops and laptops. As Steve Jobs likes to point out, this number is on the rise. In his recent keynote speech to the World Wide Developers’ Conference he noted that 50 percent of last year’s Mac purchases are from users new to the platform.

And it’s safe to predict that as the number of OS X end-users increase, so will the demand for Apple-friendly Web hosts. “It does seem that there has been a bit of a pickup this year,” said Perry. “If Apple continues to gain market share (and we believe it will), it can only be good for us.”

Aaron Faby is the president and founder of Los Angeles-based Sever Logistics, Incorporated. Server Logistics has specialized in Mac Web hosting for about four years. Formerly a Linux system administrator, Faby migrated to Macs with the advent of OS X. He says his customer base also demands a Web host that is, “Mac savvy and won’t ignore them or play ‘pass the customer’ because they are on the Mac.”

Faby also pointed out that the low market share for Mac servers actually gives the Xserve a practical advantage since it makes them less vulnerable to attacks.

Security, reliability, and performance
“It essentially boils down to security, reliability, and performance,” says Faby. “OS X is probably the safest operating system to use right now in terms of security. Of course an OS is only as secure as it’s services, so we are always on top of security issues with the various services we run such as Apache, MySQL, etc. Reliability-wise, we’ve found the Xserve to be a very reliable machine. Also, the Apple hard drive modules are tested rigorously and have a higher MTBF (mean time between failure) rating than off the shelf hard drives.”

Two of the announcements that drew the biggest cheers from the crowd at the WWDC were the added remote lights-out management and dual hot-swap power supplies. “Lights out” is a common feature with Intel servers that allows the system administrator to log in even if the server is off or has crashed allowing it to be rebooted or maintained. “These two features greatly increase the reliability of the machines. We can’t wait to get our hands on one,” said Faby.