[BiO BB] Comments on Apple Xserve?

[Steve Edberg]

Hi -

I've been looking at getting one or more external servers to offload heavy 
duty analyses - mainly BLAST - from my main Sun servers. The Apple XServe 
looks very attractive (1 RU, 1 or 2 1GHz G4 CPUs, 4 front-loading hotswap 
drive bays), particularly with the Apple/Genentech optimized NCBI BLAST:

	http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/acgresearch.html

There's some info there that says a dualG4 Xserve is ~5x the speed of a 
2GHz Pentium4 system, but - considering the source - that might be somewhat 
biased.

Otherwise, I'd go with something like a dual-Athlon 1RU rackmount box 
running Linux from a vendor like SAG Electronics (www.sagelectronics.com)

So, I'm soliciting comments for/against the Apple solution from those who 
have tried it.

Thanks in advance,

	steve edberg


+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Steve Edberg                                      sbedberg at ucdavis.edu |
| Database/Programming/SysAdmin                            (530)754-9127 |
| University of California, Davis             http://pgfsun.ucdavis.edu/ |
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