While the Xserve will be officially discontinued next week, Apple has updated the Xserve buy page to reflect an April shipping date. This could very well mean that the product’s final orders will only ship in April of this year, or could simply be an automated date based on the amount of units Apple has in stock. Apple is looking to replace the Xserve for business customers with their already existing Mac mini server product and the new Mac Pro server.  Heh.

Recent rumors claim that Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X Lion Server will be the last Mac server operating system, and also claim the current versions of Final Cut Server and Xsan to be Apple’s last. Oh, and about that XServer replacement… here is what’s next…

We’ve heard that Apple has already begun recommending a product sold by ActiveStorage that will eventually  replace Apple hardware XServes.  It should be ready next week.