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XServe RAID Finally Makes An Entrance
Currawong writes "Apple's very delayed 3U XServe RAID box has quietly appeared on their web site with details. Most interesting being that it uses ATA100 drives, rather than the usual SCSI, making it a bargain at US$10,999 for 2.52TB, especially compared to similar devices that cost up to 10 times as much for the same storage capacity. In addition, ATTO announced at the same time a MacOSX only dual-channel fibre channel SCSI card."
Hey guys, MacSlash called, they want their story from February 10th back.
The xServe RAID box has been out for a month. Why is this "news"?
Nope, this is *not* news, the XRaid is over a month old now.
I think Apple are approaching this carefully, there aren't a huge number of orders, and they know that in the server area they have to be established and seen as a long term player to gain serious marketshare. So they're doing this humbly and slowly, making sure that they get things right.
They are *not* betting the farm on the server solutions, they are great products and I think its good to see the company diversifying both above (XServe XRaid) and below (iPod) their usual established market area.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
When you get into a purchase this big, nobody buys based on name-brand alone. When you're looking at spending a minimum of about $10,000, you darn well do the math to figure cost per terabyte and you compare features and serviceability and whatnot.
I write in my journal
If you're looking for budget NAS, then you're right -- but the XServe isn't budget NAS. It's designed to compete with solutions from Sun, Dell, and IBM. And compete it does -- a client of mine managed to get two prepro models from Apple (they were basically testing them, then got to keep them). Set up as RAID 5, they are effectively as fast as a the Sun fibre channel array they are going to replace, but cost about a third as much per gig. Amazing hardware. I highly reccommend.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Having worked with three out of four of those companies, coincidentally, I can tell you that $10,000 is a very big sum to them.
To paraphrase the Simpsons, you don't get to be the biggest companies in the world by writing a bunch of checks.
I write in my journal