Xserve means quick serve. (new products).

Server management in a school often means a trip to a small wiring closet With the new Xserve, a 1U rock-mount server designed to complement Apple's UNIX-based Mac OS X software, hardware and software monitoring can be done in a snap from a desktop.

Meanwhile, the district's technology director can monitor multiple servers simultaneously. Hardware monitoring can reveal which servers are running, which are functioning properly and which are running out of storage space, for example. The reports and alerts can be viewed via e-mail, pager, cell phone or handheld computer. Software tools allow for server management and set-up. "The combination of server hardware and software is the real win here," says Alex Grossman, director of server and storage hardware at Apple.

As Apple's first rack-mounted server, the Xserv, e takes up less space than servers in the past. It's also the first 1U server to use DDR SDRAM memory with up to 2GB capacity. In talking with districts, Apple learned that the education community can never have enough storage space, Grossman says.

Xserve has the capability to host Internet sites, streaming media and other multimedia applications, adds Tom Goguen, director of server software. A district could, for example, shoot a training video and then let teachers access it from the server.

The server software is compatible with both Windows and Mac hardware. This means students and teachers can put files on the server and print from it, no matter what machine they're on. Features include:

* Single or dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, with 2MB DDR L3 cache per processor

* Three PCI slots

* Up to 2GB of DDR high-performance memory running at 266 MHz

* Software RAID mirroring for protection of important data

* A VGA graphics card

* Three 400Mpbs FireWire ports (two on the back panel and one on the front)

* Two USB ports and an optional fiber Gigabit Ethernet adapter

* Mac OS X Server software

* Native protocol support for AFP over TCP/IP, SMB/CIFS, FTP and NFS for easy integration into existing Mac, UNIX or Windows networks.

In other Apple news, the iBook line of notebooks has been updated with faster PowerPC G3 processors that now run at up to 700 MHz. Other new features include double the on-chip level 2 cache, more powerful ATI Mobility Radeon graphics processors and larger hard drives. A video-out port now supports VGA output, and S-video and composite video can be supported with the optional adapter. Education pricing starts at $1,099.

CIRCLE #525 FOR INFORMATION

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