Apple now shipping Xeon Xserves; unboxing photos

Following a rather obscure multi-month delay, Apple Computer has finally been able to push the first shipments of its Xeon Xserve rack-mount systems out the door, tipsters tell AppleInsider.

The new Intel quad-core 1U servers were announced at the company's World Wide Developers Conference during the first week of August with an estimated ship date of October.

Last month came and went without word from the Mac maker as to when the first units would actually ship. It wasn't until about a week ago that customers who placed orders back in August began receiving their shipping notifications.

As can be seen from the below set of unpacking photos (thanks, Tom), Apple employs far less fashionable packing for the enterprise-level systems than it does for its consumer products. The units ship in a large, Xeon-stamped black box layered with styrofoam, accessory packs, mounting kits, and of course, the Xserve itself.

The quad-core systems — which house two Dual-Core Intel Xeon chips — feature an industry-leading high bandwidth server architecture that includes PCI Express, independent 1.33 GHz front side buses with 4MB of shared L2 cache, and fully-buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs).

Apple says the Xeon Xserve delivers up to four times the I/O bandwidth, up to three times the memory bandwidth and twice the storage bandwidth of the its previous generation Xserve G5 systems.

Customers can configure the new Xserves with two Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running either 2.0, 2.66 or 3.0 GHz; up to 32GB of 667 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory; and up to three 3Gb/s SATA or SAS drives totaling 2.25TB of hot-plug storage.

The new servers also ships with internal graphics that can drive up to a 23 inch Cinema Display and packs two eight-lane PCI Express expansion slots that provide up to 2GB/s of throughput each to support the next generation of fibre channel, networking and graphics cards. Pricing starts at $3000.