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."

Comments

I wonder

[Oculus Habent]

I wonder what kind of acceptance rate the Xserve RAID will acheive. It seems like a useful product, but might only get niche use, as many people still view Apple products as incompatible, expensive, and underpowered, regardless of the truth. *sigh*

Re:I wonder

[fhammond]

It might be useful for people doing SD or even HD editing on the Mac. There are plenty of third-party RAID solutions for the Mac but for this market (i.e. it's gotta work, Apple has to support it and we don't care if it's expensive), the Xserve RAID would be very appealing.

http://www.lafcpug.org/review_xserve_raid.html

According to Apple, a maxed-out Xserve RAID can support an HD 1080i stream. That would be quite a thing to see. I wonder how loud this thing is? You'd hope that Apple would have predicted it'd be used by people with a G4 on their desk, not just by people with an Xserve in their data center.

Re:I wonder

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:I wonder

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Old News

[elliotj]

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"?

Re:Old News

[Drunken_Jackass]

It's not a duplicate - it's a RAID 1 mirror of the previous story.

Not news

[Nexum]

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

yes its a bargain!

[Anonymous Coward]

No you cannot buy an equivalent system for less.

does your equivalent system hav dual, redundant power supplies, dual controllers? dual ethernet? dual fiber channel? independent masters on all the disks? fit in 3-U, have hot swap? Web browser based administration? have a 3 year 4 hour response time warntee? have an available replacemt kit for all the parts? have legendary apple quality?

then there is the cost of installation and maintainence. does your system come out of the box, plug it in and spend less than ten minutes to configure it to run samba, nfs, appleshare, apache, LDAP, DNS, Netboot server, mailserver over a dual ethernet gigbit interface? with an unlimited client lic?

I'll answer for you. NO.

Re:a bargain?

[shylock0]

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.

Before the trolls get started...

[Llywelyn]

With the "that's so expensive! You can get more storage than that for $11k and more an actual computer to boot!"

This is not an offering from Apple that is designed to compete for storage in the home, except maybe for those individuals running a small business. This is not just a "bunch of storage," this is a high-quality server solution that is designed to compete with Sun and IBM.

This thing has a battery backup module for the cache, dual and *independant* RAID controllers, redundent *cooling* (incidentally, these are self regulating as well), and redundent power supplies. It also all fits inside of a 3U case, which is phenomenal, and hot-swapable drives.

Good Fiber Channel pricing

[TexTex]

One thing that is rather cool to see is Apple's pricing of their fiber channel card.

500 bucks...

If indeed this is a standard fiber channel pipe, that's a bargain. Most of the SANs I've seen run around $2000 for such a card, and it makes adding fiber worthwhile on a desktop G4 even if you need the bandwidth.