Apple today announced it has begun shipping its Xserve G5 to customers. The company says Xserve G5 delivers over 30 gigaflops of processing power per system — about 60 percent more than the PowerPC G4-based Xserve — in a 1U rack-mount enclosure. “Xserve G5 is a big hit with customers who want a powerful 1U rack-mount server for thousands of dollars less than alternatives from Dell, IBM and Sun,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With dual G5 processing power, massive storage, incredible I/O performance and Apple’s Mac OS X Server software included, Xserve G5 is affordable, easy to manage and easy to cluster.”