There's so many things wrong with what you just said.
1. It's Xserve, not Xserv.
2. Xserve RAID, the companion storage device you speak of, has been known to have a 2Gbps Fibre Channel interface for some time now.
3. I don't even know what you mean by throwing Rendezvous (not Rendevous) in, since that doesn't really mean anything in the context of enterprise storage; nor do I know what you mean by saying "maybe it'll work with Windows networks", since Mac OS X Server allows Windows clients to connect just fine (and connects to Windows servers just fine), so obviously, it will work fine with Windows networks, and neither the way storage connects to a server, nor Rendezvous, have anything to do with it.
apple's hardware? overpriced, and inferior target for programming. x86 is better because of being ubiquitous. all the other high end stuff is more scaleable. apple is just - stupid.
Hasn't the Mac vs. PC argument gotten tired yet? I thought we were talking about Apple's BSD-based OS...
Yes, there's more PCs. A shitload more. So many more that it's ridiculous. So what?
Apple OS. OS 9 and below was an industry last place horrorshow. No need to talk of that.
Sure had a lot of users...*
*Note: just because Windows has more users doesn't mean make the millions of Mac OS users a small number.
OS X picked the wrong kernel
In your opinion.
implements 95 APIs
?
And since one of the APIs is BSD, which you seem to love...
doesnt even get games on it to speak of
You keep contradicting yourself. You talk of Jordan Hubbard as a sellout because he "left" FreeBSD, but now you're obviously talking about Windows, which belongs to the biggest "corporate" titan of them all! And now you're bringing up games...games are a big market, but I give a rat's ass about games.
and uses a crappy, slow kernel
Some people would say that the hardware abstraction is a worthy tradeoff...
makes users pay for service packs
Calling 10.2 a "service pack" implies that it has the same content as Windows service packs. Mac OS X had been out for a year and a half with no paid updates. A year and a half. That's plenty within a reasonable timeframe to charge for an OS update. If Apple had called it 10.5 or OS XI, would it have made any difference? And for those who argue that OS X before 10.2 was pretty much a "beta" and Apple shouldn't have charged for it, well, I'd argue that Windows before 98 (in the consumer sector where over 50% of people still run 98) were "beta" too. Additionally, no one, including Apple, forced anyone to run OS X. Everyone could have used, and still can use, OS 9.x if they are so inclined. Mac OS X 10.1.x was good for many, and 10.2.x began the real push to Mac OS X. One paid upgrade every year and a half seems fine with me.
Dude. Relax. I'm sorry you have something against Apple. If you don't like it, don't use it. I don't know what else to tell you, except that I don't like Anime, never worked for a.com, never have been laid off, never did HTML or web shit, am not fat, and don't use IE. 0 for 7; pretty good. Though I'm not really sure what any of that has to do with Apple.
I'm just a student and sysadmin at a big ten school.
Yes, it's in its infancy, as you an I both said. Which is precisely why there are no big shops running it. Not to mention the fact that Apple is new to enterprise, and is approaching it very humbly. It will take a long time for people to trust, much less use, Apple server hardware in many environments. Also, the Xserve isn't a high end server, as I'm sure you know. It's for low- to medium-duty use (comparatively), at most. It's obviously not in the same market as high end IBM or Sun hardware, or high-end Intel-based servers.
And yes, we have servers. Tons of them. Literally hundreds of servers running mostly Solaris, AIX, Windows, and some Linux. And now, Mac OS X Server is starting to creep in. When a Sun/IBM/Dell/etc blade server would be appropriate, people are now looking at, asking about, and BUYING and DEPLOYING Apple. And I never said you should do server management at the GUI of a single server. Want to manage Mac OS X Server from the command line? Even via a serial termserver connection? Go for it. Want to manage it with Apple's remote GUI tools? Go for it. Want to manage and monitor it with HP OpenView? Go for it.
As for PowerPC: anyone who doesn't admit we're languishing, and have been for a while, with Motorola is denying the truth. Yes, Motorola sucks now at getting new PowerPC chips and technologies out the door. And IBM's PowerPC 970 will be shipping soon enough...do you have any doubt it will be shipping next year? And when it does, it will be an amazing competitor to all the other 64-bit products. This is obviously a chip destined for Apple's machines, and we'll see it next year.
Uh, why don't you just use any SCSI- or FCAL-connected array that you want then? You could use all the same SCSI disk arrays (with hardware RAID, etc.) that you use with any FreeBSD box with any Mac OS X box. And yeah, it doesn't have ECC. It doesn't have redundant power supplies. It doesn't have a lot of stuff. The product is in its infancy! Apple is just BEGINNING its enterprise strategy...and even at this early stage, people who would NEVER have bought ANY Apple hardware before are now snapping it up, for enterprise datacenters no less! For Oracle development! For biosciences computing! And you know what? We're deploying Mac OS X Server, Solaris, AIX, Linux, and Windows 2000/.NET, but NOT FreeBSD.
And since Mac OS X has vastly eclipsed the number of FreeBSD systems in use, or will ever have in use, I'd say that's a "wider audience". Even "wider than a goasemon's asshole", as you put it.
I hope you really are trolling and that you don't believe what you say, because you apparently have no idea what you're talking about. For a good, usable GUI on top of ANY UNIX, BSD or otherwise, Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server is the only game in town. Sure, Mac OS X has a long way to go. But it's done the most for UNIX (and BSD) adoption that any UNIX (or BSD) ever has. And soon, Darwin will be synced with FreeBSD 5.x functionality, so then, by your logic, Mac OS X will be infinitely better than FreeBSD, since it will be everything FreeBSD is (with the exception of the hardware it runs on), PLUS a real productivity OS that normal people can actually use! Then there's the whole Server side of the equation, where I can feel free to update my core OS and do security patches on OS X Server without going through the test-and-backout nightmare my Solaris/AIX/Linux colleagues do. Or reshare NFS filesystems out via SAMBA with the click of a button. And it only gets better.
Hardware-wise, you spouted off a bunch of shit about run-of-the-mill AMD hardware. No thanks, I'll pass. Then you spouted off a bunch of shit about 64-bit processors...you may want to take a look at the IBM PowerPC 970..., which, by many accounts, may trounce the passé 64-bit processors you list.
If you want to stick with the commandline (which has nothing to do with Mac OS X's main markets) or the Gnome/KDE amateur hour, go for it.
I remember back in 1992 the University of Michigan's College of Engineering had a couple wireless computer labs (both for classroom use) set up for testing. One used Motorola's Altair 18GHz radio product, another an infrared product.
In fact, here's a Network Magazine article from almost 10 years ago exactly on the topic:
I remember the Altair presenting an interesting problem because its data packets were slightly smaller than AppleTalk packets; the AppleTalk packets had to be split up and performance was severely degraded.
Yes, you are wrong
on
10.2.2 Is Coming
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The GUI to enable journaling in Disk Utility will only be exposed on Mac OS X Server 10.2.2. The option will NOT be present in Disk Utility on Mac OS X 10.2.2 (non-Server). Thus, the only way to enable it on non-Server is to use:
No, it's not "sneaking" anything in. This is Apple's packaged version of Pioneer's firmware update fixing the now-well-known issue with not properly handling high speed media.
And uh, it ejects copyrighted CDs because it can't recognize them, since they don't conform to the Red Book Audio CD specification, not because it's trying to prevent you from using them. In fact, your premise is laughable, since if Apple really was in bed with the DRM crowd as you seem to suggest by your innane statement, then Apple WOULD support copy protected CDs, effectively furthering the potential for marketplace acceptance. By NOT recognizing copy protected CDs, it's actually doing the anti-DRM crowd a great service by refusing to bend over to support these "CDs".
And finally, Apple isn't "cozy" with the DMCA at all. It was the quickest path to get a vendor from illegally distributing iDVD, which is Apple proprietary material, with OEM CD-RW/DVD-RW drives. Though the DMCA may make us cringe, Apple was 100% in the right:
Reason enough is that there is no legal way for anyone to obtain iDVD without buying a system from Apple that has a SuperDrive in it. iDVD is not free; it is included ONLY with these systems and there is no other way to obtain it. Therefore, this vendor distributing (or encouraging the illegal acquisition of) iDVD at all is already illegal, and Apple had every right to stop it. (There are several other reasons, such as maintaining a single, predictable, known set of hardware that iDVD runs on to keep the best possible user experience for such a critical product, but the fact that no one else can legally distribute iDVD, nor can they ask customers to illegally obtain it, is reason enough.)
Active Directory for Mac OS X Server v10.1: Learn how to integrate Mac OS X Server v10.1 with
Microsoft Active Directory. (v10.2 customer, refer to the Administrators Guide for Active Directory integration documentation.)
The Mac OS X Server 10.2 Admin Guide is available from:
So, you've just heard all about Xserve, and what we'd like to also do is give you a little technology preview of something that we're going to be rolling out around the end of this year, and that is a companion product called Xserve RAID. So, this is Xserve and Xserve RAID is an amazing companion storage product, and it looks like this. I'd like to invite Alex Grossman from Apple up to give us a preview of Xserve RAID.
[Alex Grossman, Director, Hardware Storage Marketing, Apple]:
01:19:50
Thanks, Steve. Okay. I'm really excited to give you a technology preview of our rack-optimized storage, and rack-optimized storage is the perfect complement to the server. What we've done is developed a very high density, 3U height rack-optimized storage device that has 14 drive bays. And with that density, we're able to put 14 120GB hard drives in the same Apple carriers that we use in the server, and deliver 1.68TB of storage, and that's massive. But to get that storage to the server, we had to choose a high-speed interconnect. We chose what we think is the best, which is 2Gb fibre channel. But we went one step further, and we put dual 2Gb fibre channel on the system. That gives us 400MB/sec of storage throughput. That's just incredible. And that is the latest and the greatest fibre channel out there. But RAID systems are all about data protection and to achieve data protection, we put dual RAID controllers in the system, and we put all the critical components as redundant components. In fact, the drives, the power, and the cooling are redundant in the system. And they're hot swappable. The way we achieved this was through a brand new Apple design architecture. And let me take you through that really quickly. The architecture has 14 independent hard drives and each RAID controller connects to 7 of these hard drives. The hard drives have independent ATA controllers that go to the heart of the system, and the heart of the system is the RAID processor. The RAID processor is very fast, and it's powerful. And we've added 128MB of processor cache to it for even better performance. Up on the top of the diagram, there's a little blue icon, probably not familiar to all of you, but that's the icon for 2Gb fibre channel. So our 2Gb fibre channel controller actually has its own dedicated PCI bus to the RAID processor. And that gives us substantial throughput, really really high throughput. This thing was designed for max throughput. Off to the side of that, you'll see what we call the RAID Environment Manager, and that's a tool - it's actually an embedded coprocessor - that gives us the ability to manage these RAID systems remotely. So we can set them up, we can manage them, and we can monitor them, very similar to what we do with Xserve. If we put the whole thing together and look at the entire diagram, we see that on each side, we have redundant power, we have redundant load-sharing power supplies, and in the center we have redundant cooling. And just like Xserve, the cooling is smart, so if one of the cooling systems fails, the other one will take up the speed. You'll also notice the little green bars up on top. Those are redundant drive cache, so, actually, we cache the processor memory. And overall, this makes a very fault tolerant system with very high throughput. Xserve RAID is going to be available, as Steve said, by the end of calendar year 2002. So let me just sum it up for you real quickly. 14 drive bays, very high density 3U enclosure, 1.68TB of massive storage online, and 2Gb fibre channel. That's Xserve RAID. And this is only a technology preview, we're going to announce this later in the year. Thanks, Steve.
It is IDE.* It is also hardware RAID. Being IDE does not preclude it from also being hardware RAID.
Xserve RAID is a 2Gbps FCAL-connected IDE-based hardware RAID array. Get it?
If you think you need SCSI, get an Ultra160 SCSI card from Apple, and get a SCSI-based array from some other vendor.
*For reference, see http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/xserve/
You'll have to watch the rollout, but when Jobs talks about Xserve RAID, he touches on the fact that it's hardware RAID, and uses the same disk packs as the Xserve (i.e., IDE).
This DOES NOT, however, mean that it's "slow", just because it's not SCSI.
As for adding your own Ultra160 SCSI-connected disk array, I'm lost on why you think that it must be Dell? All I'm saying is that if people are hell-bent on running SCSI for some reason, they're more than welcome to. If you're actually "thinking different" by switching to an all Apple solution as you indicated, you'd do well to consider the IDE-based Xserve RAID when it's available...because its performance will be very impressive.
You keep saying "nuclear reactors" as if it's something evil...grouping them in with "guns" and "WMD". What's wrong with nuclear reactors?
(And where do you think our power is going to come from in the future? Not coal, oil, or gas...what then? WIND? LOL!!)
No, and how wrong your logic is. Up until now, the only way to get a new version of Mac OS X Server that was a paid upgrade (like 10.2 from 10.0.x/10.1.x) was to buy it outright at full price...this actually makes it cheaper in the long run, assuming there's more than one paid update during the 3 year period.
Additionally, Apple will continue to release updates and patches that keep previous versions of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server secure as long as they're in routine use. Apple has already released security updates for 10.1.x, even after 10.2 was out.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice catches. :P
There's so many things wrong with what you just said.
1. It's Xserve, not Xserv.
2. Xserve RAID, the companion storage device you speak of, has been known to have a 2Gbps Fibre Channel interface for some time now.
3. I don't even know what you mean by throwing Rendezvous (not Rendevous) in, since that doesn't really mean anything in the context of enterprise storage; nor do I know what you mean by saying "maybe it'll work with Windows networks", since Mac OS X Server allows Windows clients to connect just fine (and connects to Windows servers just fine), so obviously, it will work fine with Windows networks, and neither the way storage connects to a server, nor Rendezvous, have anything to do with it.
4. It's iPod, not IPod.
...this is fixed in 10.2.3.
apple's hardware? overpriced, and inferior target for programming. x86 is better because of being ubiquitous. all the other high end stuff is more scaleable. apple is just - stupid.
Hasn't the Mac vs. PC argument gotten tired yet? I thought we were talking about Apple's BSD-based OS...
Yes, there's more PCs. A shitload more. So many more that it's ridiculous. So what?
Apple OS. OS 9 and below was an industry last place horrorshow. No need to talk of that.
Sure had a lot of users...*
*Note: just because Windows has more users doesn't mean make the millions of Mac OS users a small number.
OS X picked the wrong kernel
In your opinion.
implements 95 APIs
?
And since one of the APIs is BSD, which you seem to love...
doesnt even get games on it to speak of
You keep contradicting yourself. You talk of Jordan Hubbard as a sellout because he "left" FreeBSD, but now you're obviously talking about Windows, which belongs to the biggest "corporate" titan of them all! And now you're bringing up games...games are a big market, but I give a rat's ass about games.
and uses a crappy, slow kernel
Some people would say that the hardware abstraction is a worthy tradeoff...
makes users pay for service packs Calling 10.2 a "service pack" implies that it has the same content as Windows service packs. Mac OS X had been out for a year and a half with no paid updates. A year and a half. That's plenty within a reasonable timeframe to charge for an OS update. If Apple had called it 10.5 or OS XI, would it have made any difference? And for those who argue that OS X before 10.2 was pretty much a "beta" and Apple shouldn't have charged for it, well, I'd argue that Windows before 98 (in the consumer sector where over 50% of people still run 98) were "beta" too. Additionally, no one, including Apple, forced anyone to run OS X. Everyone could have used, and still can use, OS 9.x if they are so inclined. Mac OS X 10.1.x was good for many, and 10.2.x began the real push to Mac OS X. One paid upgrade every year and a half seems fine with me.
LOL, showing people slashdot threads and having "fun" by not making any cohesive arguments about anything? I guess now we know who the loser is.
If you wanted to actually discuss the advantages, and disadvantages, of Apple's hardware, OS, and strategies, I'd be happy to, though...
...or words that contain "cunt"?
Dude. Relax. I'm sorry you have something against Apple. If you don't like it, don't use it. I don't know what else to tell you, except that I don't like Anime, never worked for a .com, never have been laid off, never did HTML or web shit, am not fat, and don't use IE. 0 for 7; pretty good. Though I'm not really sure what any of that has to do with Apple.
I'm just a student and sysadmin at a big ten school.
Yes, it's in its infancy, as you an I both said. Which is precisely why there are no big shops running it. Not to mention the fact that Apple is new to enterprise, and is approaching it very humbly. It will take a long time for people to trust, much less use, Apple server hardware in many environments. Also, the Xserve isn't a high end server, as I'm sure you know. It's for low- to medium-duty use (comparatively), at most. It's obviously not in the same market as high end IBM or Sun hardware, or high-end Intel-based servers.
And yes, we have servers. Tons of them. Literally hundreds of servers running mostly Solaris, AIX, Windows, and some Linux. And now, Mac OS X Server is starting to creep in. When a Sun/IBM/Dell/etc blade server would be appropriate, people are now looking at, asking about, and BUYING and DEPLOYING Apple. And I never said you should do server management at the GUI of a single server. Want to manage Mac OS X Server from the command line? Even via a serial termserver connection? Go for it. Want to manage it with Apple's remote GUI tools? Go for it. Want to manage and monitor it with HP OpenView? Go for it.
As for PowerPC: anyone who doesn't admit we're languishing, and have been for a while, with Motorola is denying the truth. Yes, Motorola sucks now at getting new PowerPC chips and technologies out the door. And IBM's PowerPC 970 will be shipping soon enough...do you have any doubt it will be shipping next year? And when it does, it will be an amazing competitor to all the other 64-bit products. This is obviously a chip destined for Apple's machines, and we'll see it next year.
You expect home/academic productivity users to use FreeBSD as a desktop? Now THAT'S laughable...
...just can't handle it can you? And oh yeah, it really hurts to be on the losing side. It kinda "hurts" like sex "hurts".
Uh, why don't you just use any SCSI- or FCAL-connected array that you want then? You could use all the same SCSI disk arrays (with hardware RAID, etc.) that you use with any FreeBSD box with any Mac OS X box. And yeah, it doesn't have ECC. It doesn't have redundant power supplies. It doesn't have a lot of stuff. The product is in its infancy! Apple is just BEGINNING its enterprise strategy...and even at this early stage, people who would NEVER have bought ANY Apple hardware before are now snapping it up, for enterprise datacenters no less! For Oracle development! For biosciences computing! And you know what? We're deploying Mac OS X Server, Solaris, AIX, Linux, and Windows 2000/.NET, but NOT FreeBSD.
And since Mac OS X has vastly eclipsed the number of FreeBSD systems in use, or will ever have in use, I'd say that's a "wider audience". Even "wider than a goasemon's asshole", as you put it.
I hope you really are trolling and that you don't believe what you say, because you apparently have no idea what you're talking about. For a good, usable GUI on top of ANY UNIX, BSD or otherwise, Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server is the only game in town. Sure, Mac OS X has a long way to go. But it's done the most for UNIX (and BSD) adoption that any UNIX (or BSD) ever has. And soon, Darwin will be synced with FreeBSD 5.x functionality, so then, by your logic, Mac OS X will be infinitely better than FreeBSD, since it will be everything FreeBSD is (with the exception of the hardware it runs on), PLUS a real productivity OS that normal people can actually use! Then there's the whole Server side of the equation, where I can feel free to update my core OS and do security patches on OS X Server without going through the test-and-backout nightmare my Solaris/AIX/Linux colleagues do. Or reshare NFS filesystems out via SAMBA with the click of a button. And it only gets better.
Hardware-wise, you spouted off a bunch of shit about run-of-the-mill AMD hardware. No thanks, I'll pass. Then you spouted off a bunch of shit about 64-bit processors...you may want to take a look at the IBM PowerPC 970..., which, by many accounts, may trounce the passé 64-bit processors you list.
If you want to stick with the commandline (which has nothing to do with Mac OS X's main markets) or the Gnome/KDE amateur hour, go for it.
TeXShop, a native Mac OS X TeX previewer:
m l
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.ht
Also, check out the Mac OS X TeX/LaTeX site:
http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
Now Slashdot's gone from not only repeating articles, but to posting duplicates of articles that are still on the front page!
(See about 3/4 of the way down the Apple section's page...)
I remember back in 1992 the University of Michigan's College of Engineering had a couple wireless computer labs (both for classroom use) set up for testing. One used Motorola's Altair 18GHz radio product, another an infrared product.
4 S0062
In fact, here's a Network Magazine article from almost 10 years ago exactly on the topic:
http://www.networkmagazine.com/article/NMG2000072
I remember the Altair presenting an interesting problem because its data packets were slightly smaller than AppleTalk packets; the AppleTalk packets had to be split up and performance was severely degraded.
The GUI to enable journaling in Disk Utility will only be exposed on Mac OS X Server 10.2.2. The option will NOT be present in Disk Utility on Mac OS X 10.2.2 (non-Server). Thus, the only way to enable it on non-Server is to use:
sudo diskutil enableJournal [volume]
And you don't have to format to enable it.
No, it's not "sneaking" anything in. This is Apple's packaged version of Pioneer's firmware update fixing the now-well-known issue with not properly handling high speed media.
And uh, it ejects copyrighted CDs because it can't recognize them, since they don't conform to the Red Book Audio CD specification, not because it's trying to prevent you from using them. In fact, your premise is laughable, since if Apple really was in bed with the DRM crowd as you seem to suggest by your innane statement, then Apple WOULD support copy protected CDs, effectively furthering the potential for marketplace acceptance. By NOT recognizing copy protected CDs, it's actually doing the anti-DRM crowd a great service by refusing to bend over to support these "CDs".
And finally, Apple isn't "cozy" with the DMCA at all. It was the quickest path to get a vendor from illegally distributing iDVD, which is Apple proprietary material, with OEM CD-RW/DVD-RW drives. Though the DMCA may make us cringe, Apple was 100% in the right:
Reason enough is that there is no legal way for anyone to obtain iDVD without buying a system from Apple that has a SuperDrive in it. iDVD is not free; it is included ONLY with these systems and there is no other way to obtain it. Therefore, this vendor distributing (or encouraging the illegal acquisition of) iDVD at all is already illegal, and Apple had every right to stop it. (There are several other reasons, such as maintaining a single, predictable, known set of hardware that iDVD runs on to keep the best possible user experience for such a critical product, but the fact that no one else can legally distribute iDVD, nor can they ask customers to illegally obtain it, is reason enough.)
The Active Directory documentation for Jaguar Server is now integrated into the Mac OS X Server 10.2 Admin Guide; from http://www.apple.com/server/resources.html:
2 015
Active Directory for Mac OS X Server v10.1: Learn how to integrate Mac OS X Server v10.1 with Microsoft Active Directory. (v10.2 customer, refer to the Administrators Guide for Active Directory integration documentation.)
The Mac OS X Server 10.2 Admin Guide is available from:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=12
Particularly, see:
Chapter 2: Directory Services (p.65)
Using an Active Directory server (p.104)
Mac OS X Server 10.2 is free (plus S&H) for all Xserve owners:
http://www.apple.com/server/uptodate/
In other words, he should have been using 10.2.x.
No, you're completely and totally wrong.
& ci d=4549231
1. There is no such product as "X-RAID" from Apple, nor will there ever be. It is called "Xserve RAID".
2. Xserve RAID is ***NOT*** SCSI. It is connected via 2Gbps fibre channel (not SCSI), and its internal disks are ATA (not SCSI).
See this post for the transcript of the Xserve RAID introduction:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=43540
From http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/xserve/
[Steve Jobs:]
01:19:15
So, you've just heard all about Xserve, and what we'd like to also do is give you a little technology preview of something that we're going to be rolling out around the end of this year, and that is a companion product called Xserve RAID. So, this is Xserve and Xserve RAID is an amazing companion storage product, and it looks like this. I'd like to invite Alex Grossman from Apple up to give us a preview of Xserve RAID. [Alex Grossman, Director, Hardware Storage Marketing, Apple]:
01:19:50
Thanks, Steve. Okay. I'm really excited to give you a technology preview of our rack-optimized storage, and rack-optimized storage is the perfect complement to the server. What we've done is developed a very high density, 3U height rack-optimized storage device that has 14 drive bays. And with that density, we're able to put 14 120GB hard drives in the same Apple carriers that we use in the server, and deliver 1.68TB of storage, and that's massive. But to get that storage to the server, we had to choose a high-speed interconnect. We chose what we think is the best, which is 2Gb fibre channel. But we went one step further, and we put dual 2Gb fibre channel on the system. That gives us 400MB/sec of storage throughput. That's just incredible. And that is the latest and the greatest fibre channel out there. But RAID systems are all about data protection and to achieve data protection, we put dual RAID controllers in the system, and we put all the critical components as redundant components. In fact, the drives, the power, and the cooling are redundant in the system. And they're hot swappable. The way we achieved this was through a brand new Apple design architecture. And let me take you through that really quickly. The architecture has 14 independent hard drives and each RAID controller connects to 7 of these hard drives. The hard drives have independent ATA controllers that go to the heart of the system, and the heart of the system is the RAID processor. The RAID processor is very fast, and it's powerful. And we've added 128MB of processor cache to it for even better performance. Up on the top of the diagram, there's a little blue icon, probably not familiar to all of you, but that's the icon for 2Gb fibre channel. So our 2Gb fibre channel controller actually has its own dedicated PCI bus to the RAID processor. And that gives us substantial throughput, really really high throughput. This thing was designed for max throughput. Off to the side of that, you'll see what we call the RAID Environment Manager, and that's a tool - it's actually an embedded coprocessor - that gives us the ability to manage these RAID systems remotely. So we can set them up, we can manage them, and we can monitor them, very similar to what we do with Xserve. If we put the whole thing together and look at the entire diagram, we see that on each side, we have redundant power, we have redundant load-sharing power supplies, and in the center we have redundant cooling. And just like Xserve, the cooling is smart, so if one of the cooling systems fails, the other one will take up the speed. You'll also notice the little green bars up on top. Those are redundant drive cache, so, actually, we cache the processor memory. And overall, this makes a very fault tolerant system with very high throughput. Xserve RAID is going to be available, as Steve said, by the end of calendar year 2002. So let me just sum it up for you real quickly. 14 drive bays, very high density 3U enclosure, 1.68TB of massive storage online, and 2Gb fibre channel. That's Xserve RAID. And this is only a technology preview, we're going to announce this later in the year. Thanks, Steve.
[applause]
It is IDE.* It is also hardware RAID. Being IDE does not preclude it from also being hardware RAID. Xserve RAID is a 2Gbps FCAL-connected IDE-based hardware RAID array. Get it? If you think you need SCSI, get an Ultra160 SCSI card from Apple, and get a SCSI-based array from some other vendor. *For reference, see http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/xserve/
You'll have to watch the rollout, but when Jobs talks about Xserve RAID, he touches on the fact that it's hardware RAID, and uses the same disk packs as the Xserve (i.e., IDE). This DOES NOT, however, mean that it's "slow", just because it's not SCSI. As for adding your own Ultra160 SCSI-connected disk array, I'm lost on why you think that it must be Dell? All I'm saying is that if people are hell-bent on running SCSI for some reason, they're more than welcome to. If you're actually "thinking different" by switching to an all Apple solution as you indicated, you'd do well to consider the IDE-based Xserve RAID when it's available...because its performance will be very impressive.
Two problems with your post:
1. Xserve RAID runs IDE drives internally, just as the Xserve itself does (albeit with hardware RAID capability).
2. You have always been able to get an Apple-supported Ultra160 SCSI card, and add any external SCSI disk array you wish.
You keep saying "nuclear reactors" as if it's something evil...grouping them in with "guns" and "WMD". What's wrong with nuclear reactors? (And where do you think our power is going to come from in the future? Not coal, oil, or gas...what then? WIND? LOL!!)
No, and how wrong your logic is. Up until now, the only way to get a new version of Mac OS X Server that was a paid upgrade (like 10.2 from 10.0.x/10.1.x) was to buy it outright at full price...this actually makes it cheaper in the long run, assuming there's more than one paid update during the 3 year period. Additionally, Apple will continue to release updates and patches that keep previous versions of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server secure as long as they're in routine use. Apple has already released security updates for 10.1.x, even after 10.2 was out.