APPLE NOTES

Apple 1U Rackmount Server

Published in SOS August 2002
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Technique : Apple Notes

A rack full of Xserves.

There has been an exciting Apple product announcement almost every month this year, but the new Apple 1U rackmount server may be the most exciting yet, especially for touring musicians and studio installations.

Apple's latest Mac slipped discretely onto the web site when no-one was looking, and finally adopts the 19-inch rack format that professional audio and music gear has been packaged in for decades. So does this mean that Apple have released a Mac aimed at this market? Well, not quite. The server market also makes use of 19-inch racks, and this is who Apple are targetting with their new Mac: say hello to Xserve.

Not known for a lack of prowess in the miniaturisation department, Apple have managed to fit the most powerful Power Mac specification currently available into a single-unit rack space: dual 1GHz G4 processors each with a 256K Level 2 and 2MB Level 3 cache allowing a 4GB/s throughput. There are four removable drive bays, each able to accomodate a standard Apple Drive Module of either 60GB or 120GB, which means you can have almost half a terabyte of hard disk storage available. And memory options are similarly well-catered for with four DIMM slots each supporting up to 512MB modules, giving you a maximum of 2GB RAM.

The depth of the Xserve is 28 inches, making the unit deeper than it is wide, but this means there's space for two full-length PCI cards and a half-length card. This latter expansion option can be filled with either a Gigabit Ethernet card or a ATI 4x graphics card with support for two monitors via DVI, VGA and S-Video connectors. For external connectivity you have three FireWire and two USB ports. Pricing starts at around £2500 with a single-processor configuration and £3500 with a dual-processor one.

Although the Xserve has been designed as a server, musicians and studio engineers have been searching for a rackmountable Mac solution for years, with some of the earliest attempts requiring you to rebuild your machine into completely separate enclosures. The most recent solution from Marathon allows you to leave your Mac in its original case, but it still looks strange to see a Power Mac lying on its side (and this can affect the performance of the optical drives). So a purpose-built, single-rack-space enclosure holding the most powerful single or dual-processor CPU Apple have ever shipped, not to mention the multiple hot-swappable drives, should be everything the musician on the road or studio technician has ever dreamed about. Only one question remains: can the Xserve fulfil this role or not?

Apple are already suggesting the Xserve as a rackmount workstation for digital video professionals, which makes perfect sense now that Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro are fully compatible with OS X. However, the build-to-order service on the Apple Store doesn't offer a DVD-burning Superdrive (or even a CD-burning combo drive) as a replacement for the 24x CD-ROM drive, though presumably this may be added at a later date. But the good news is that because Apple are recommending the Xserve as being suitable for video, which is generally more demanding than most audio processing, we can assume the hardware is more than suitable. The only potential stumbling block at present seems to be the operating system.

To be immediately useful in the current high-end audio market, the Xserve would need to be able to run some flavour of OS 9. Unfortunately, the guys at Apple tell me this is technically impossible. It's also important to point out that the Xserve runs OS X Server rather than the OS X (Client) that comes installed on every other Mac. In theory, OS X Server should have everything OS X Client has (and will have) for running music and audio software, plus a little bit more to allow it to fufil its raison d'être.

So for the time being, the Xserve takes its place in the 'watch this space' category, and I'll let you know more when I get some hands-on experience in the next couple of months. For more information about the Xserve, check out Apple's web site at www.apple.com/xserve.

The X Files     The notion of OS X being 'nearly' suitable for music production is in danger of becoming a monthly cliché, but finally it seems to be turning into a reality. Although Jaguar (the much-talked about next release of OS X that will include full support for music and audio) is still in the pipeline, OS X versions of popular applications continue to be released. The OS X-compatible Reason 2 began shipping in June, joining the likes of Live, Melodyne, Peak, Sibelius and Spark, which are already available, and separate OS 9 and X demo versions are downloadable from www.propellerheads.se. Of course, the OS X applications most musicians are waiting for include those developed by companies like Steinberg, Emagic, Digidesign and MOTU. And in order to reassure Mac-based musicians, Apple have extended their 'Music and Audio' web page at www.apple.com/creative/musicaudio to include notable contributions from Steinberg and Emagic CEOs Manfred Ruerup and Sven Junge. Both affirm their company's support for OS X with Cubase SX/Nuendo and Logic respectively, but neither will commit to a public release schedule. Marketing directors from Digidesign and MOTU also pledge their support to the Mac, but neither touch on the issue of OS X, which is particularly surprising in the case of MOTU whose engineers apparently "eat, breathe and sleep Macintosh 24/7/365 to bring you the most advanced music and audio recording system ever made for Mac." On the hardware front, MOTU do at least provide OS X drivers for their MIDI interfaces, and Emagic have OS X drivers for the EMI 2|6. In fact, although not strictly related to OS X, this month has seen the version 2 release of the drivers for OS 9.x, which noticably improves the latency (Emagic claim 4ms), along with many other improvements. Download your copy at: www.emagic.de/english/support/download/toolsmac.html. But finally, getting back to X, RME have released early alpha OS X drivers for their Hammerfall DSP range. Although these are slightly limited at this stage, requiring a sizeable CPU overhead, and intended mostly for developers, they're freely downloadable at: www.rme-audio.de/english/mac/osxdsp.htm, where you can also find more information about their installation and operation. Mark Wherry