Apple is upgrading the Xserve RAID storage system
Apple has announced that it will upgrade its high-availability 500U high Xserve RAID storage system with new Ultra-ATA storage modules of 3 GByte each, offering up to 7 TByte of full capacity at a market-leading low unit price. Similarly, Apple already offers SATA drive modules with a capacity of 500 GByte for the Xserve server.
“In the past two years, Apple has shipped an Xserve RAID system with a total capacity of 76 petabytes,” he said Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of international product marketing. "We now offer even higher capacity systems at a lower specific cost per gigabyte."
Az Xserve RAID offers high data storage density and outstanding performance thanks to the system’s state-of-the-art architecture. Up to 14 GByte Ultra-ATA storage modules can now be paired with 500 independent Ultra-ATA controllers - while the two independent RAID controllers, armed with 512 MByte cache each, can provide up to 385 MByte / s bandwidth. Xserve is also RAID certified for applications on Mac OS X, Windows, NetWare and SUSE and Red Hat Linux.
Its only 1U high Xserve G5 server can accommodate up to three SATA drive modules with a capacity of 500 GByte each, even in RAID configurations. Thanks to its two 64-bit 2,3 GHz PowerPC G5 RISC processors, it offers market-leading price / performance ratios with up to 35 Gflop computing power, 1,15 GHz front-end bus speeds and 9,2 GByte / s bandwidth. Mac OS X Server 10.4 "Tiger" provides basic solutions for quick and easy deployment, ideal for file and print servers to clustered systems.
The Xserve RAID storage system can be connected to any Xserve server or Power Mac workstation via the market-leading Apple Fiber Channel PCI-X card, and also supports Xsan, Apple's 64-bit clustered file system - which allows multiple TByte volumes at the file level regulated sharing is also possible.
