Apple announced this week that it will stop selling its Xserve servers at the end of January but promised to continue support for Xserve customers with service parts for warranty and out-of-warranty service. Systems bought between now and 31 January will have the company's standard one-year warranty and customers will have the option to extend technical support and hardware service coverage to three years from the date of purchase.

For customers looking to replace or supplement their existing Xserve systems, the vendor offers its Mac Pro or Mac mini desktop products running Apple's Snow Leopard Server UNIX operating system.

In a document explaining details of the transition, the company writes that Mac Pro system provide performance and expandability that are equal to those of Xserve: "The Mac Pro tower form factor can be deployed in an office environment on or under a desk, or in a data center environment on a shelf in a rack with two units per 12U."

The company said that a single Xserve machine can be replaced with one or multiple Mac mini systems, depending on workload.

According to Gartner, Apple has not had a strong position in the worldwide server market, which in the second quarter of 2010 was dominated by HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle and Fujitsu. See table below.