TORONTO — The Minnesota Wild and Apple Computer have something in common these days: they’re both showing up in places no one would have expected them to a year ago.
For the NHL expansion team, it’s the Stanley Cup playoffs. The Wild defeated the heavily-favoured Colorado Avalanche to advance
to the Western Conference Semifinals against Vancouver.
In the case of Apple, it’s the enterprise server market. Maybe that’s why the two were drawn to each other in the first place. The Wild offers fans watching from the 74 luxury suites at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minn., the ability to watch high-definition game images on PowerBook G4s while browsing live stats, scores and news over the Internet.
The data is created, stored and delivered on Apple’s Xserve rack-mounted server hardware. While the team has a PC-based network, it is using the Xserve to handle media-rich images. The team claims it saves money too because it doesn’t pay client access fees for Mac OS X Server or for QuickTime Streaming Server.
Apple marketing representatives were in Toronto recently, emphasizing the cost advantage and administrator-friendly aspects of Xserve.
Xserve aims to serve its existing client base in the small to medium-sized business market and traditional markets such as education and publishing. However, it has also been attracting a new customer base such as the Wild, according to Eric Zelenka, senior product marketing director with Apple in Cupertino, Calif.
In the case of Virginia Tech University, the school created a math lab with 526 Macs managed by one system administrator.
“”They needed to be able to quickly reinstall or reconfigure their systems and reduce system support costs and downtime,”” said Zelenka.
Prior to switching to Xserve, it would take Virginia Tech administrators three to four days to get the job done. But using a feature called NetBoot, the administrator accomplished the task automatically from the network and reconfigured all systems in six minutes.
The school also wanted to restrict users from burning data to CDs and from introducing USB and Firewire devices.
“”We can manage all sorts of aspects of the desktop,”” said Zelenka. “”We’re giving system administrators powerful tools to set up machines easily and reduce total cost of ownership on all systems using Mac OS X server,”” he said.
Apple claims the rack-mountable Xserve costs less than comparable servers. For example, the Xserve with 720GB of storage/150MB/s is US$2.70 per GB compared to Dell’s PowerEdge 1650 438 GB/43MB/s at $6.20/GB.
For the Xserve RAID, released in February and targeted at companies with large amounts of data to store, he said the cost for 2.5 Terabytes of storage is CDN$17,000 or $6.75 per gigabyte compared to Dell/EMC CX200 at $48,000 or $21.82 per gigabyte. Xserve RAID features dual independent RAID controllers, a dual 2Gb Fibre Channel interface, and dual power supplies.
William Powell, strategic development manager for Markham-based Apple Canada could not cite sales numbers for the server product line, only indicating they were “”ramping up.””
The Xserve has been available in Canada for about nine months and that RAID was just released. Powell also noted that enterprise organizations tend to take longer to investigate and make decisions around server purchases.
According to IDC Canada analyst Alan Freedman, in 2002 there were 480 units of Xserve servers shipped in Canada, valued at US$1.8 million. The first shipment was made in Q2 of last year.
“”I’m not hearing anything about it really, but traditionally they (Apple) have been very strong in the education market so it would make sense those with desktops and mobiles would be interested at some point,”” said Freedman. “”It’s a real opportunity for them because they have a fervently loyal customer base.””
While the Xserve have been for sale by resellers for some time now, Powell said Apple is currently pursuing a certification process for resellers that will be mandatory.
“”We really need our resellers to engage in proper training and certification for this,”” he said.
