Sandwiched between music and iPod news, Apple took the wraps off of the 3U Xserve RAID storage system and latest G5 server.
Microsoft, meanwhile, committed to delivering Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and Virtual PC for Mac 7.0 during the first-half of the year.
Office improvements include Project Center to manage information, scrapbook for quick access to text, logos and other elements, and Excel Page Layout View to view and manipulate the spreadsheet exactly as users see it on paper, including margins, headers, footers and page layout.
Microsoft’s suite will be available in three editions: Standard, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage and MSN; Student and Teacher edition, which comes at a discount; and Mac Professional Edition that will include Virtual PC for Mac 7.0 with Windows XP Professional for the first time to access Windows-only software and devices.
Looking to hardware, Apple announced its 3U Xserve storage unit, that includes 3.5 TB storage capacities, supports Windows and Linux, and also Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) connectors. Veritas, Red Hat, Brocade and QLogic also back the unit.
Apple also claimed the latest Xserve G5 is the company’s most powerful server unit. Features include 30 Gigaflops of processing power per system; a new system controller with up to 8Gb of PC3200 ECC memory and three hot-plug Serial ATA drive modules for 750GB of storage.
Apple called the Xserve G5 the perfect server for today’s Unix-based applications.
The XServe G5 is available in three configurations: a single 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 processor device with 512Mb of PC3200 ECC RAM, a dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 processor based unit with 1GB of PC3200 ECC RAM, and cluster-optimized dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 processors with 512Mb of PC3200 ECC RAM.
This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.
