The Xserve was often regarded as a wise step by Apple into the business-oriented world of servers. NASA, the US Navy, Virginia Tech and transaction operator xTech were high-profile clients who used the rackmount servers as an energy-efficient and sometimes more powerful alternative to Opterons and Xeons. However, there was always a disclaimer attached to the purchase: because Xserves used PowerPC processors, IT managers were beholden to PowerPC's intermittent performance updates and running PowerPC-based versions of even standard Linux software. ITJungle's Timothy Morgan notes that the advent of Intel-based Xserves should offer a dramatic change: Xserves might be able to run more operating systems (including more Linux distributions), receive more predictable performance upgrades similar to Windows counterparts, and even offer better performance for the price.