Starting with the 2nd of February 2011, Xserve, the server created for large businesses use, will be withdrawn by Apple. The last update undergone by Apple was in April 2009 thus this change was becoming inevitable, judging by Apple keeping its hardware on a 9-month to a year update cycle, reports ZDNet.

The new product, Mac Pro, that will be offered at the price of $2,999, will feature a 2.8 Gigahertz quad-core Intel Xeon processor, with the possibility to configure it up to 2.93 Gigahertz six-core Xeon processors, and up to 32GB of memory. It will also have four hard drive bays, and will come with Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard.

Considering all the decisions taken by Apple in the last period of time, namely the contracts signed with Unisys to sell hardware to large companies and government agencies,  it seems that the company wants to expand on the businesses market. According to IDC, Apple had 3.6 percent of all commercial computer sales during the third quarter of this year.

While it’s not the biggest money-maker for Apple, its other devices are maintaining its control over the cloud, and Apple’s been putting a good amount of resources into this aspect of its company as well.  It’s purchased land earlier this year to grow its storage facilities, and the growth of personal cloud services for storing movies, music and the like means Apple still has its hands in several pots right now.