DailyTech - New Apple Xserve RAID Details Leaked

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Hardware New Apple Xserve RAID Details Leaked
Tuan Nguyen (Blog) - January 22, 2007 8:48 AM

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14 comment(s) - last by scrapsma54.. on Jan 24 at 10:31 PM

Apple brings SATA to its enterprise level RAID solution

Customers waiting for Apple to release brand new Xserve RAID systems may be in for a treat. According to a report by AppleInsider, a reader has managed to come across a pre-production unit of Apple's upcoming Xserve RAID enterprise level server. One of the things that Apple has not done recently is change the appearance of their aluminum brushed machines. The new Xserve stays in the same fasion as its predecesors, but one things has changed -- storage. The new Xserve uses Serial ATA (SATA) drives instead of regular parallel ATA (IDE) drives.

While current generation Xserve 1U serveres are already equipped to handle either SATA or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives, Apple's Xserve RAID systems were only capable of using parallel drives. Like the current Xserve RAID, the pre-production unit appears to be able to take up to 7TB of storage by using 14 500GB drives.

While no formal release date was mentioned in the report, we can expect Apple to release the new Xserve RAID close to the same date as its planned release for Leopard. Apple currently prices the Xserve RAID at a starting price of $5,999 USD with 1TB of storage. A fully equipped Xserve RAID will ship with 7TB of storage and can be had for $12,999 USD. Of course, other options are also available such as cache-backup battery units.

Apple launched its new Intel-based Xserve servers last year in August with a warm reception from enterprise users -- formally transitioning its entire lineup of computers over to the x86 architexture.

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Seems Pricey

By bhieb on 1/22/2007 12:29:42 PM , Rating: 3

Seems a little pricey. I just put together a Promise J300S with 12 750GB nearline drives in a RAID 6 for < $8500 with the $750 Adaptec 4805s card. This yeilds 6.9TB with dual redundacy in RAID 5 it would be 7.6TB. I know support is worth something, but $3,500. Sorry just not enough bang for my $$$.

RE: Seems Pricey

By FITCamaro on 1/22/2007 12:41:31 PM , Rating: 2

Hence why I don't buy Apple.

Was that RAID for personal use or a company. If for personal use, my god man, how much porn do you have?

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RE: Seems Pricey

By bhieb on 1/22/2007 1:22:34 PM , Rating: 2

It was for personal use (media server), but it was originally only supposed to be 4tb or so. I had issues with windows when testing trying to add a drive. The controller saw the extra space fine, but windows only say 11mb unallocated. So after hours on the phone with adaptec and microsoft. I decided screw it and just bought another 4 drives to fill up the enclosure. I do see myself budgetting more for porn though good idea.

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RE: Seems Pricey

By FITCamaro on 1/22/2007 1:30:31 PM , Rating: 2

Windows only seeing 11MB un allocated sounds right. There's always some portion of the drive that Windows doesn't allocate. Did you mean allocated?

Wish I had the cash to drop $8500 on hard drives and a controller. There's a buttload of video I'd love to have. Not porn.

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RE: Seems Pricey

By bhieb on 1/22/2007 1:50:55 PM , Rating: 2

What I mean is I add about 350GB of space by adding another drive to the RAID. The contoller sees it, but it should show up in Disk Management as unallocated space on the partition. I should then be able to use diskpart to extend the partition into that space. Problem is Windows does not see the additional space correctly even though the controller has expanded to include the additional disk.

Either way problem solved.

I have to say it is pretty sweet saying I have almost 7TB at the house!

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RE: Seems Pricey

By scrapsma54 on 1/24/2007 10:31:18 PM , Rating: 2

See this is the reason You never see apple products being used
in a corporate environment. Apple needs to learn that their computers need to be more flexible and less of a static computer, and have a bang for the buck. Apples iPhone proved to be worthless since the battery life only is 6hrs and it costs, what? $500!!? wtf. They expect you pay a premium to provide you with a lousy device that does the same thing as something that is $1000 cheaper. Apple has been trying to pull fast ones ever since its lawsuit of eMchines.

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RE: Seems Pricey

By TomZ on 1/22/2007 3:41:26 PM , Rating: 2

I agree. 2 years ago, we used a rack-mount PC with PATA RAID 5, to build a 1.2TB array out of 400GB drives. It runs Windows 2003 Server, and in total cost less than half the cost of the Apple $6K 1TB offering.

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RE: Seems Pricey

By tjoynt on 1/22/2007 4:22:37 PM , Rating: 2

A large part of the cost is the 6 or 12 Fiber Channel ports on the XServe RAID. (The prototype show has 6 ports, but only one controller: nearly all enterprise raid arrays have a least 2 controllers.) Those puppies are uber-expensive, but are necessary to make it enterprise-worthy.

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RE: Seems Pricey

By JeffDM on 1/23/2007 6:04:59 PM , Rating: 2

Xserve RAID is intended for very large organizations (enterprise). They are actually pretty competitive with other enterprise storage systems.

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Only 500GB drives?

By dice1111 on 1/22/2007 11:05:06 AM , Rating: 2

You'd think that with 1TB drives on the way, we could throw in some 750GB'ers in there? I know price would go way up, but at least give us the option so we can get even more excited.

Plus with a larger cost it would make the 500GB version's a lot less intimidating regarding price.

RE: Only 500GB drives?

By TomZ on 1/22/2007 3:43:36 PM , Rating: 2

I agree, and I would expect fewer drives to be physically smaller, use less energy, generate less heat, and be more reliable. Considering Apple's "premium pricing" model, I would expect that 750GB drives would be affordable and expected in that product.

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hat does "Xserve RAID enterprise level server" mean?

By kekken on 1/22/2007 3:48:42 PM , Rating: 1

So,the Apple Xserve RAID is apparently a storge solution for Applle's Xserve servers, then what does "Xserve RAID enterprise level server" mean? Thanks.

RE: hat does "Xserve RAID enterprise level server" mean?

By JeffDM on 1/23/2007 6:13:25 PM , Rating: 2

I don't know on the second part, that's probably just fluff words thrown in by someone trying to look smart.

On the first part, Xserve RAID is just a Fiberchannel RAID box, it works with any OS that has Fiberchannel support. A lot of the RAID systems were sold for non-Apple server systems use. There was even an independent forum available to show admins how to use Xserve RAID with other brands of servers.

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