Prices are list prices from HP and Apple online stores. The HP
prices are
often discounted if you buy from a VAR and Apple prices are also
discounted
if you negotiate a company discount with Apple.
That's an $1800 difference PER SERVER just for the hardware. It's my
understanding (I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong), that you need
to spend another $999 per server for the unlimited users OSX license
to use it for a big honkin' streaming server.
No. The only thing limited about the Mac OS X Server 10-client is
concurrent file sharing users ONLY. Everything else is completely
unlimited. (The HP also doesn't include an OS, which may not be an
issue, but it's still a point of information.)
Also, a dual 2.3 GHz Xserve G5 configured as above is $3249 ($2724
education and government) - that would be an Xserve Cluster Node,
which is all you need to meet the above specifications.
I agree that for your task, some other server may be a better value.
But in some instances, the G5 is still a better value than the
alternatives:
