Appletell

Psystar is now branding themselves as “the leading provider of Mac-compatible computers,“ and they’ve released server grade machines. Server-grade machines are all well and good, but “the leading provider of Mac-compatible computers?“ Really?

First of all, every computer on the market today—HP, Dell, and tons of others—is Mac-compatible. After all, the Mac is a computer, and it communicates back and forth with these other computers. Assuming they meant “Mac OS X-compatible,“ did they completely forget Apple existed? Or, have their sales somehow shot up above Apple’s recently? Also, I don’t know what they think “compatible” means, but the Psystar OpenComputer is just as compatible with OS X as any other computer is. The only difference is that it comes pre-installed with Leopard, while others require some do-it-yourself.

Questionable branding aside, let’s move on to the newest addition to the OpenComputer family, the OpenServ. It comes in many different configuration options, most comparable to Apple’s XServe, and at $1,000 off the XServe’s price. This raises colossal questions, however. Would you trust the hacked OS to run your server? Would you trust that Psystar would be around long enough to support the server? Would you trust the quality of a machine that is said to be comparable to and a stripped down version of the XServe in the same sentence? Do you think you will remain sane after hearing the 24/7 full-blast fans that are likely to be a feature of the OpenServ, just like the OpenComputer?

Sound off in the comments below.

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The Keynote may be the main attraction at WWDC, but there is always much more to come even after Steve leaves the stage. In today’s WWDC happenings, the Apple team detailed the server version of Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. The following comes from a MacNN report.

“As with [Consumer Version of Mac OS 10.6], Server will focus on making all aspects of the OS mutlicore-ready through Grand Central, with the option of tapping into GPU power via OpenCL. Because Server will operate on a 64-bit kernel, it should in theory support up to 16TB of RAM.“

iCal, Mail and Address Book will all be receiving upgrades, increasing their speed and stability. Other highlights include the addition of Podcast Producer 2, along with native programs and templates for creating blogs, wikis, mailing lists, and RSS Feeds.

Via [MacNN]

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In the midst of all the Mac Pro frenzy, the other update that Apple released today, an update to their XServe was largely overlooked. The new XServes were updated with the same architecture as the new Mac Pros. The standard configuration is as follows [from Apple.com].

• One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processor
• 2GB (2x1GB) 800MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMMs
• 80GB 7200-rpm SATA Apple Drive Module with 8MB cache
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet
• Internal Graphics
• Two FireWire(R) 800 and three USB 2.0 ports
• Unlimited Client License for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server

There are some huge expandability options here, most notably up to two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeons, 32 GB of RAM, and up to a 300 GB, 15,000 RPM Hard Drive.

Read [Apple.com]

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Parallels was spotted at WWDC this week giving a demo of a new product. Called Parallels Server for Mac, it is essentially virtualization software for server use. The team showed SuSe Enterprise, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Solaris 10 and FreeBSD 5 happily coexisting on a single XServe.

However, when asked why Mac OS X server was not running in a virtual machine, Ben Rudolph, director of Corporate Communications at Parallels stated that Apple requires its operating systems to run on physical Apple hardware. He further mentioned that “Apple has been a great partner to (them)“ and they wouldn’t “want to jeopardize that relationship”.

Expect a beta build of Parallels Server in several months time.

Read [MacWorld]

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