Yahoo! News – Blueprint for an Apple Xserve Rollout
“Xserve is like a BMW engine. It’s fast, safe and reliable,” Toker noted, adding that the company researched white papers and tested the Xserve against competitors, such as Dell and IBM. In the long run, especially from clients’ perspectives, the Xserve made more sense.
One of the most surprising things I read in this article was this: “a strong selling point is the tightly coupled integration between the Xserve’s OS and its hardware platform.”
So the open hardware standard we’ve heard touted for so long may not be as strong as the integrated approach used by Sun and Apple, the two companies most often cited as not offering a compelling reason to buy their products over their “open” rivals.
Perhaps the value of time spent debugging and devising workarounds for mismatched components is better understood these days.