Intel Xserve picture
The Xserve is the last Apple machine to move to Intel processors, and it brings huge benefits. Now sporting to 2 Dual-core Xeon processors it flies even faster. One massive bonus of the Xeon chips is the whole things runs cooler, which let Apple make space for a redundant power supply, should you want it. It also includes a built-in video card, so no more struggling to configure it remotely out of the box. The 3 drive bays now support 750Gb drives for up to 2.25TB internal storage, it supports up to 32GB of RAM and includes 2 full length 8x PCI Express slots as well... 2x 2.0Ghz Dual Xeons, 1Gb RAM, 80Gb, OS X Server Unlimited, £1871+VAT
XRAID picture
XRAID provides the lowest price per gigabyte storage of any proper RAID solution on the market today. Featuring redundant power and cooling systems, dual hardware RAID controllers, dual 2Gb fibre-channel ports, 14 hot-swap driver bays, and supporting RAID 0,1,3,5, 0+1 and RAID 10, 30 and 50 via software. Capacity, rundundancy and performance. Did I mention its also qualified to be used with OS X, Windows and Linux?

A proper Apple server (at last)

For a long time Apple's server solutions have been fairly half-baked. Appleshare IP really wasn't a high-performance, high-availability system at all, due to the inherent instability of OS 9. However all this changed with OS X Server. Because its based on a BSD unix core, it has rock solid reliability. File-sharing performance is massively improved for both Mac, Windows and Unix clients. OS X Server provides file sharing via Appleshare, Samba, NFS and FTP, web services via Apache, WebDAV, MYSQL, email via Postfix, and Directory Services via DNS, DHCP, Open Directory and Kerberos.

Xserve - Serious server iron

With all this new capability in the server software, suddenly Apple needed proper server iron to run it on. No more bog-standard desktops sitting in a corner running as the "server." Xserve is a fully dedicated rack-mount server, featuring hot-swap drive bays, dual ethernet, PC expansion for fibre-channel, quad ethernet, or a hardware RAID controller. With appropriate network hardware you can get 6Gb ethernet performance, more than enough for the busiest print or video production environment. What's more OS X Server can be configured for use in high-availablility environments via server redundancy, server failover, ethernet connection bonding and more.

XRAID - Serious RAID storage

For some people the 1.5TB internal storage offered by the Xserve isn't enough. Whilst external RAID solutions are available, often the most cost-effective solution is to get an XRAID, Apple's 14 drive 3U RAID system. Each drive has its own independent IDE controller for maximum performance. Currently the maximum drive size is 500GB, but with hard drives constantly increasing in capacity, it won't be long before you'll be able to get a 14TB array.

XSAN - Serious SAN, sensible money

Used in conjunction with XSAN software, an Xserve, XRAID and fibre-switch can be used as a massively fast SAN, perfect for video-editing suites or high-bandwidth content creation industries. The combination of Xserve, XRAID and XSAN can also be used to create fault tolerate systems for critical data and processes.

OS X Server configuration services

Sweet-Apple can assist in determining hardware requirements for server installations, provide the hardware, and most crucially, install, configure and remotely manage your Mac OS X Server installation. Everything from basic share configuration, through to DNS, DHCP, Mail, OpenDirectory, Kerberos, network home folders for hot-desking, high-performance network tweaking, backup and disaster recovery planning. We will support and troubleshoot existing installations providing adequate existing documentation is available.

Macs2u

As the Bath and Wiltshire Macs2u representative I can supply the complete range of Apple products as well as a massive range of hardware & software from a range of vendors, all at very competitive prices. I should be able to match the prices that you see in MacWorld and MacFormat, but I'm confident that I will provide a superior level of after care.

Visit the Macs2u web site for more of who we are, and how we work. And if you know colleagues outside my area, why not give them the Macs2u address and see if they have a Macs2u representative in their locality?

Call or email me for the sort of service the "box-shifters" cannot match.