Although the machines are aimed at environments where Macs are plentiful--places like schools and graphics departments--the XServe is also designed to be a good server for common business-computing tasks such as handling Windows files, e-mail and Web pages. Included software can check on the health and status of a drive and is designed to predict when a failure might occur.
"It's totally not like (Apple's previous servers)," said Peter Glaskowsky, a senior editor for the Microprocessor Report, an influential industry newsletter. "It's a serious server."
Glaskowsky said the fact that Apple has a custom chip to speed input/output functions shows the company means business. He also noted that the timing is right, with Apple now using the Unix-based Mac OS X.
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