Apple ships Xsan enterprise file storage system
updated 08:50 am EST, Tue January 4, 2005
Apple ships Xsan
Apple today began shipping , its high performance, enterprise class Storage Area Network (SAN) file system. The company says the system is priced at the "industry's most aggressive price point of $999 per client and per server." Xsan offers scalable, high-speed access to centralized shared data for storage consolidation and workflow in video post production, data center, broadcast and high performance computing environments. The 64-bit cluster file system for Mac OS X provides multiple computers with concurrent file-level read/write access to shared volumes over Fibre Channel. Apple says that under Mac OS X for the first time, up to 64 video professionals can simultaneously access a single storage volume that supports multiple high-bandwidth video streams.
Setup, administration and monitoring is built into the Xsan administration software. It provides volume management, SAN file system configuration and remote monitoring in a single integrated, easy-to-use application, including functions for user quotas and access controls for restricting storage usage and file access. Xsan is also interoperable with ADIC's StorNext File System and can be used in heterogeneous environments including Windows, UNIX and Linux operating system platforms. Additionally, Xsan is supported by ADIC's data management software, StorNext Management Suite.
Apple has qualified Xsan with the Xserve G4, Xserve G5, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G5, Xserve RAID and Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X cards. Xsan requires Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server 10.3 software and will support qualified Fibre Channel switches from vendors such as Brocade, QLogic or Emulex. It is available for f $999 per client and per server.
