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Apple Canada Inc. says it's not poised to dance its way into the enterprise server market--it just wants to "rack and roll."

Perhaps it will with the launch of Xserve, the company's new rack-mount server. It was released in Canada in early July and Steve Hellyer, a consulting engineer for Apple Canada in Markham, Ont., says it is targeted at the enterprise space.

"This server is targeted at anyone who requires a server of this type," says Hellyer. "It's targeted at the enterprise space, education space, governments, less so at the SOHO (small office/home office) space. It's definitely not for the consumer market.

"But we're not trying to move into the enterprise space, not at all. This is not a new strategy for Apple. It does have some bleed-over in that we do have large customers in the publishing industry, for instance, that need fast servers."

The server comes in two configurations. Both boast dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processors. Each has 2MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) L3 cache, and DDR SDRAM memory with up to 2GB capacity. Moreover, Xserve offers 480GB of storage on four hot-plug ATA/100 drives and networking with standard dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Xserve is priced between $4,699 and $6,299, depending on the configurations, Xserve can also be customized to meet specific customer requirements.

"It's fantastic in that it's a purpose-built server," says Brian A. Smith, a technologist and a Macintosh service certified Apple product professional at Sheridan College's school of animation, arts and design, in Oakville, Ont. "The previous generations were converted desktop machines. But Xserve is designed as a server with all the features you'd want--that's one thing we noticed right away. Our IT department is impressed with it as well. They've ordered two for testing purposes."

Smith says Xserve is powerful enough for a large corporation to invest in. "It's easy to manage and it's an easy install, it only took us 15 minutes to get it up and running. The software management suite is great and it's intuitive for non-technical administrators, which is something you'd likely see in smaller offices ... but it is scalable also, and it could comfortably work for a large corporation," he says. "People who've never looked at an Apple alternative in their server rack should look at it. We've had a lot of PC-centric IT people parading through to see it and they've been impressed with it."

Hellyer describes the Xserve as self-monitoring, compact and extremely powerful. He says the server's software will immediately alert its user if it's not performing up to specification, making warning signs clear before a problem erupts. One feature he highlighted was that the ATA drives would warn the user if one was about to fail, and the drives themselves are hot swappable. "ATA drives don't like to be bounced in and out of machines like that," he says. "We wanted to take advantage of the reduced cost of ATA drives. By modifying the technology and providing separate busses, you can exceed a lot of SCSI drive performance."

On the MacOSX.com Web site, a message board for the Mac user community, reaction to the Xserve is excitement. "It would be suicide for Apple to brand the Xserve as a Mac considering previous Mac servers had p--- poor offerings and reputation in the past," wrote Sim X, a self-described Mac genius in San Francisco. "Xserve is a completely new concept to anything that is currently in the competing server market. This is a damn powerful machine, especially since Apple managed to squish it all into a 1U rack-mount."

Alan Freedman, server market analyst for IDC Canada in Toronto, says Apple's Xserve would indicate the company is inching its way into the enterprise space. "It doesn't position them to compete against the mainframes and high-end servers, but it does give them an entry into more volume-oriented Web loads," he says. "Apple's initial goal here should be to do well with its install base and it may get converts from the Intel-based platform if those businesses are running on Unix."

Freedman lauded the Xserve for answering Apple's customer demands in a rack-mount server.

"It's got a small form factor compared to traditional rack-mount servers, it has low processing power and it's easy to access with regards to hardware components," he says. "There's also the serviceability issue. It's a tool-less repair if you need to take it apart. It's definitely ahead of Apple's past servers in this space, and with an OS that's tuned for servers. It's a substantial offer."

Meanwhile, Apple's upgraded OS X operating system, version 10.2 (dubbed Jaguar), will be released in Canada Aug. 24. Alykhan Jetha, president and CEO of Markham, Ont.-based software developer Marketcircle Inc., said his company began beta-testing Jaguar some time ago. "I'm very impressed with the changes they've made," Jetha says. "We've been running OS 10.1, and it's not bad at all, there were no complaints there until I saw Jaguar. The system is more responsive."

Apple's been busying itself inking deals with HP, Epson and Lexmark. In doing so, it's ensuring Jaguar's Rendezvous feature (a means of creating an IP-based network of computers and devices without any configuration) is adopted by those companies' respective network printers.