This new Xserve has really impressive specs and will no doubt make inroads as an excellent choice for organizations that are looking for a powerful server that is both easy to setup and use. The new Xserve specs can be viewed on the Apple website. In addition to the impressive hardware specs, the fact that the new Xserve comes with Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard Unlimited-client edition represents a price/performance/usability standard that is, in our opinion, hard to match.

Now that Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard is shipping there is a big question that time will answer: Will Leopard Server, with its new iCal Server, allow customers to buy an Xserve running Leopard Server and use it as a replacement for a Microsoft Exchange Server? This should get interesting…

Download a copy and try it for yourself. We’re pretty sure you won’t be disappointed - we’re not.

The Gantt charts that OmniPlan creates are truly beautiful to behold. This is a great app!

The question is will the iPhone with push email from Yahoo! be a viable alternative to the very wide adoption of the BlackBerry in the enterprise? In our opinion, it will definitely take some time as the BlackBerry has a lot of features intended and optimized for enterprise users. We will delve into this subject more deeply, but for now we just wanted to pose the question.

We’re particularly interested in iCal Server. Will it, along with Mail Services and Collaboration Services (including iChat Server and Weblog Server) be a possible replacement solution for existing Microsoft Exchange customers? It should be interesting to see what features Mac OS X Server Leopard actually ships with.

"OS X is designed differently from the ground up—applications and user programs don't get as 'involved' in the base OS as Windows," said author Richard Forno, the former chief security officer for Network Solutions.

Out of the box, only SSH is enabled on OS X and, upon starting, users must create an account and password. Root access for applications is discouraged. By comparison, Windows systems ship with most services enabled.

"Deploying a Mac environment means you're not running around with daily software updates or responding to incessant viruses and worms. That alone will save significant sums and staff headaches," said Forno, who noted the same goes for Linux and BSD boxes.

Complete entry

The Xserve is a 1U rack-mountable server (and in fact it’s the heaviest 1U device we’ve ever come across). Our review model came with a pair of 2GHz G5 processors, plus 1GB RAM (there are eight memory slots, and the machine can accept up to 8GB).

The front panel houses three removable hot-swap drive trays; ours had three 250GB Hitachi Serial-ATA disks. (Note that there’s a variant called the Cluster Node, which is designed to be part of a redundant cluster and which has just one drive bay instead of three). There’s also a slot-loading CD-ROM drive as standard, though you can have a combined CD-RW/DVD-ROM if you prefer. Also on the front panel are the on/off switch and its associated status LED, the system lock switch (which is used to physically disable peripherals such as the keyboard and mouse for security, though you have to remember to enable the feature in the OS or it simply won’t have any effect) and a button/light pair that doubles as both a system identifier and a problem alert lamp. Alongside the alert indicator is a 400MHz FireWire (IEEE1394) port, which complements the pair of 800MHz ports on the back of the box, and then comes a pair of Ethernet link status lights and two rows of blue LEDs that show processor load (there’s a row of eight for each processor).

Complete entry