xServe a steal?

Mr. Steinberg writes here about just how cheap Apple's xServe Servers are compared to the competition. Unfortunately it reads like a lot of his articles, in that seems as though he is reading straight from the PR sheet and is only hired to generate some pro/con website traffic. Specifically...

Now $2,799 may not seem exactly cheap, but when you start comparing it to the competition, you'll find the Apple Xserve lies at the lower end of the price scale. You could spend thousands more on servers from those big name PC box makers and not get anything as fast or flexible as an Xserve.

If you actually compare those prices to any of the decent x86 server makers you find out two things:

The xServe compared to PC servers from Dell/etc is often not an apples to apples comparison.
They aren't taking into the account OS licensing costs

By an apples to apples comparison, I mean the architecture and components involved on a typical xServe versus a typical x86 server. x86 server hardware is almost always a little bit behind the fastest desktops, but the components are geared towards server applications, not desktop. By this I mean that servers usually have higher-performance and higher-reliability drives suited for server tasks (SCSI) while desktops use IDE. Most x86 servers in the xServe's price range have SCSI drives, and the xServe has IDE. Most x86 servers in the xServe's price range have EEC RAM (error correcting), while the xServe uses DDR.

For a server, where uptime is important, EEC RAM/SCSI drives are important, albeit more expensive and the fact that the x86 often have better components at a cheaper/competitive price should give you a heads up. If you wanted a cheap, x86 server which essentially used off-the-rack PC parts (which is what the xServe is), you could get one for a lot less than the xServe.

Now we're at licensing costs, which is where the real deal with the xServe is, which is why it makes me so sad that the author completely misses the point yet again. We've established the hardware isn't any more expensive, so why will your price be twice the xServe if you buy a Dell server with windows?

Because of the windows licensing cost! Microsoft has a per-seat licensing cost for its server products. In other words, if your server was going to be serving files to 10 people it would be cheaper than if your company had 100. Apple with the xServe includes OSX, which is about $1k normally, and gives you an unlimited license.

Which means you get the exact same benefits (even cheaper) if you use a Dell/x86 box running a unix variant like Linux or freeBSD. That is the real story, that apple isn't imposing harsh licensing costs, not that their hardware is cheaper.