CUPERTINO, Calif., July 1 -- Apple today announced that is has begun shipping Xserve, its powerful new rack-mount server, and has received orders for over 4,000 Xserve servers since its introduction in May. Apple also announced that industry standard performance tests show Xserve outperforms more expensive, similarly configured server offerings in web serving, disk performance and running the mission-critical Biotech application BLAST. "We introduced Xserve only a few weeks ago, and we've already received orders for over 4,000 of them," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president, Worldwide Product Marketing. "Xserve's G4 processing power, massive storage, incredible I/O performance and Mac OS X Server software with unlimited-client licenses are making it a hit with customers who want an affordable, powerful 1U rack-mount server." Industry standard tests show Xserve delivers exceptional performance, out-classing more expensive, similarly configured servers from Dell, IBM and Sun. As measured side-by-side in web serving, BLAST implementation and disk performance, Xserve outperforms its competitors in the following ways: -- Apache Web Server -- Xserve can support 60 percent more connections on an Apache Web Server than an IBM eServer x330. Under industry standard WebBench* performance benchmarks, an Xserve running Apache on Mac(R) OS X Server can support 4,051 web connections per second compared to 2,547 connections per second on an IBM eServer x330 running Apache on Linux. Xserve provides an affordable and robust server platform for even the most industrial strength web applications. -- BLAST implementation -- Xserve is up to 19 times faster than Sun for DNA searches running BLAST. This is based on a standard search of over 34MB of data, with Xserve running Apple/Genentech BLAST, a Sun Fire V100 running NCBI BLAST on Solaris and an IBM x330 running NCBI BLAST on Linux. On a word length of 8, Apple's Xserve is nearly 8 times faster than IBM and over 19 times faster than Sun. On a word length of 40, Xserve is 5.8 times faster than IBM and 13.9 times faster than Sun. An Xserve running Apple/Genentech BLAST reduces search time from hours to minutes for the kinds of gene searches life sciences customers perform every day. -- Disk performance -- Apple's integrated hardware and software and a unique independent ATA drive architecture allow Xserve to offer higher disk performance at a lower cost than SCSI drive based servers. Xserve provides performance of over 110MB using a four way ATA RAID stripe compared with a Dell PowerEdge 1650 with hardware RAID controller with a three way SCSI RAID stripe which provides only around 70MB sustained throughput. Xserve provides an industry leading balance of performance, capacity and price. Its dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processors each have 2MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) L3 cache, and DDR SDRAM memory with up to 2GB capacity. Xserve offers best-in-class storage, with up to 480GB on four hot-plug ATA/100 drives, and best-in-class networking with standard dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Xserve includes an unlimited-client license to Mac OS X Server software, offering users a perfect combination for file/print service, video streaming, database applications, computational clustering and web and mail serving. Apple offers a choice of world-class services and support programs for Xserve including 4-hour on-site response, 24x7 technical support, AppleCare Service Parts Kits and the AppleCare Professional SupportLine and Tools program.