Lock the doors, board up the windows, and don the tin-foil hats: Xserve is here. And by "here," we mean here here, not "we announced it so it's here" here. Actually, wait, no, we don't mean here here, because if we had one here, as in right here in the AtAT studios, we'd be way too busy cackling with manic glee, rubbing our hands together in that movie villain manner, and plotting our imminent ascension to Evil Overlord status to be telling you about it. Alas, an Xserve may fit happily in 1U of space in an industry-standard 19-inch rack mount, but it won't fit no way no how into AtAT's budget until we either win the lottery, sell another several hundred t-shirts, or cross a certain ethical line we drew for ourselves many years ago and follow through on a contingency plan involving a safe deposit box, three videotapes of grainy footage of an unnamed (and unclothed) multibillionaire CEO engaging in "questionable behavior" at an underground nightclub of ill repute, and a word that sounds an awful lot like "shmackmail." For the sake of karma, we'll just do without for the time being.

No, by "here" we mean only this: the thing is finally shipping. Faithful viewer Dan Smith was kind enough to forward us his shipping confirmation notice, which states that his own Xserve is winging its way Danward as of yesterday, and similar reports are popping up all over. (Um, the "similar reports" state that other preordered Xserves are making their individual ways to their respective purchasers, and not all to Dan. We just wanted to make that clear, so Dan doesn't feel let down when he doesn't find a few hundred Xserves on his doorstep over the course of the next few days. Inflated expectations can be a real kick in the teeth.) So if you're one of those people who doesn't like ordering new stuff until it actually becomes available and you're in the market for the first real Mac server ever to grace our otherwise dreary plane of existence, you can officially add an Xserve or six to your shopping list now. Go ahead. Pencil it in there, right under paper towels and English muffins.

By the way, if you're still on the fence as to whether or not an Xserve would be worth your while from a cost effectiveness standpoint, we noticed over at MacNN that Xinet has posted some of the Xserve's first comparative benchmarks, and to us, at least, things look just spiffy. Overall, the dual-1 GHz Xserve soundly outperforms a dual-1 GHz Power Mac G4 in both the "Output Generation" and "Photoshop Opens" tests, at least under heavier loads, showing just how much difference little tweaks like DDR RAM can make.

Better yet, though, the Xserve more than held its own against a dual-1.4 GHz Dell PowerEdge 1650, which got spanked by the Xserve in both tests, particularly at the high-load end of the spectrum. Now, granted, the Dell PowerEdge 1650 starts at just $1499 while the dual-processor Xserve has a sticker price of four grand-- but Xinet didn't use bare-bones systems in its testing. If you take the time to configure a 1650 to match the specs of the one Xinet used, you'll find it costs roughly $5600 for a 5-client license, or $7300 for a 25-client one. (Granted, much of that is the "Microsoft tax," but hey, they tested it with Windows 2000...) Meanwhile, the Xserve as tested (maxed out at .48 TB of storage-- drool, drool) prices out at $6000 and comes with an unlimited client license. So if you're talking bang for the buck, the Xserve is pretty clearly a winner, here.

Of course, we could also mention how the Xserve did respectably well against massive SGI and Sun servers that cost an order of magnitude more; buy a six-pack of Xserves, pop 'em in a rack, enjoy blinding performance and super-safe redundancy, and save tens of thousands off the price of a quad-processor Sun Fire 8800. But hey, only if you feel like it.