The Xserve is a sleek 1U silver rackmount unit with a stylish front panel (see photo below). The front panel features four removable, hot-swappable IDE drives and a fixed CD-ROM drive. There's also a trouble indicator, a machine-identification button, a power button, a locking mechanism for the case, and cool blue activity LEDs similar to those you would see on a 1980s car-stereo amplifier. The machine runs on a pair of Motorola PowerPC G4 chips with 2 MB of DDR (double data rate) Level 3 cache, with the chip core running at 1 GHz.
The main system memory is DDR SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM) with a maximum of 2 GB. The Xserve comes with three PCI slots, two of them functioning at 66 MHz with a 64-bit data path and the other operating at 33 MHz with a 32-bit data path. Apple includes an on-board graphics card and the option of adding a 4x AGP (accelerated graphics port) card for those who want to use the machine in a racked workstation configuration. You also can get an optional Ultra3 SCSI card for external storage devices.
Network connections consist of two Gigabit Ethernet copper interfaces on the back of the machine. There's also the option of a Gigabit Fiber interface in an available expansion slot. The Xserve comes with a few features that would be marginally useful in an enterprise data center, such as the three FireWire ports--two on the back of the machine and one on the front. There are also two USB 1.1 ports and one DB-9 serial port for console access.
The Xserve is in a server-in-a-drawer configuration. Loosening the two thumb screws lets you slide the guts of the machine out of the rack where they'll snap into place for servicing. You shouldn't have any problems servicing the Xserve. However, because the Xserve doesn't come with cable management, be sure to unplug it before trying to pull the machine out for service or upgrade. Otherwise, you may strain the cables or pull them forcibly out of the back of the machine.
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