Now, it was obviously completely overshadowed in the Mac world by yesterday's revelation that the Dell Dude got busted for buying drugs, so we felt we should mention it since you probably missed it: Apple just updated the Xserve. This follows last week's update of the iMac, which, as usual, happened just as we went on hiatus, simply because Apple really likes to mess with our heads. The iMac update, since we haven't had a chance to mention it before, brought the line faster processors, a zippier SuperDrive, DDR memory, internal support for AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth, and lower prices; check last week's press release for more details, as well as that awesome line about Apple having "ignited the personal computer revolution," which we never get tired of seeing. (It's like Shakespeare, Joyce, or the takeout menu from the Chinese place on the corner; no matter how many times we read it, we always find something new.)

As for the Xserve, well, the upgrades are pretty much along the same lines, only perhaps less so. According to the press release, the new Xserves feature slightly juiced processors (now up to 1.33 GHz), faster DDR RAM, faster hard drives, a higher storage capacity, and a $200 price break. It's nothing that's going to make any sysadmins run up and give Phil Schiller a big, sloppy kiss on the mouth without downing a whole lot of hard liquor first, but it's still welcome news to anyone who had been saving up to drop three grand on one o' those luscious slabs of server-on-rye.

What is slightly more cause for major Schiller smoochage (not to mention a quick cuddle in the coatroom with hardware guru Jon Rubinstein) is the fact that Apple has finally gotten its RAID system out the door-- or on the way out the door, since it's slated to ship next month. This frisky puppy takes the phrase "storage density" to scary new depths, packing up to 2.5 terabytes of hard disk into a mere three units of rack space. For those of you who don't feel like firing up Calculator, we're talking 2520 GB of storage-- plenty of room for even the most demanding environments. And if you need even more (man, that is one immense collection of Internet porn you've got there), you can always just add "more Xserve RAID systems for virtually unlimited expansion."

So what's this RAID system gonna cost you, you ask? Well, the base model is six grand, and that scores you 720 GB of storage; if you want the "Burrito As Big As Your Head" model, the 2.5 TB config costs a surprisingly low $10,999. (Good thing it's not $11,000; that extra buck would kill a lot of deals.) Keep in mind that you'll also have to fork over $499 for a fibre channel card for the Xserve itself, but hey, at least it comes with cables. And don't forget, you're not just paying for storage; you're paying for all sorts of serverish fun, like "redundant hot swap power and cooling modules [that] can be replaced in seconds without any interruption of service," and something that we can only refer to as "crazy-ass fault tolerance": "in the event of a drive failure, access to data remains unaffected while data is automatically rebuilt on a spare drive." Yowza.

Word has it that the Xserve isn't catching on nearly as quickly as Apple would like, so it'll be interesting to see whether the advent of a truly sick RAID option gooses sales at all. Our only concern: what right-thinking IT director is going to buy an Xserve and RAID system when it still lacks an industry-standard floppy drive? After all, a backup of 2.5 TB of data onto 1.8 million floppies sounds like a pretty crucial strategy to us...