Apple has announced it will discontinue Xserve from 31 January, saying it will “transition away” from the line of server solutions.
A document has been posted on the resources section of its site, stating it will not create a future version of the Xserve line and will stop selling it from January.
All Xserve warranties will be supported and they will keep selling existing Apple Drive modules for it until the end of 2011 or until they sell out.
The company will also support Xserve customers with parts for warranty and out-of-warranty services.
Apple has also given suggestions of what alternatives there are for it. The company suggests they buy Mac Pros with the Snow Leopard Server installed or the Mac mini with the Snow Leopard Server for a lower cost though not as powerful as the Xserve.
The Xserve was introduced in 2002 and was used as a file server, web server or high-performance computing applications without clustering.
Businesses tended to prefer Windows or Linux-based servers, so it never found great success in this area.
