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).

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