Apple trademarks "XSAN" [Archive]

dukemeiser

Mar 29, 2004, 10:32 PM

Or Xsan or xSan. Trademarked on March 10. Description is for "computer hardware and software." Is this something that is already being used? Or have I finally found new trademark that nobody else has? "Computer hardware and software" makes it sound like it has been announced yet.

Sun Baked

Mar 29, 2004, 10:57 PM

Hopefully it's the long-awaited Apple Storage Area Network device people have been waiting for.

aswitcher

Mar 29, 2004, 10:57 PM

tomf87

Mar 30, 2004, 10:19 AM

dukemeiser

Mar 30, 2004, 11:05 AM

Ah ha! So it is an unannounced product. But unfortunately, a very boring one for most people. :(

tomf87

Mar 30, 2004, 12:49 PM

Well this could really open up some doors for Apple in corporate networks. The XServe already has great capability, and by the looks of this, it can have tremendous storage capability with clustering.

szark

Mar 30, 2004, 12:53 PM

Very interesting. I like the potential implications of this -- Apple seems to be putting more and more pieces into place for a push into the enterprise arena.

tjwett

Mar 30, 2004, 01:40 PM

interesting. i just read a big article about SAN in last month's issue of Mix. i'm assuming this XSAN will have something to do with some high-speed mass storage for high-end audio/video work. currently i think SAN is used mostly in major post production houses and mega recording studios. sounds awesome too. probably won't ever make it's way into my tiny bedroom studio though. :)

rdowns

Apr 5, 2004, 05:18 AM

Very quietly, Apple has also trademarked "Next Tuesday" Steve Jobs said, "We're not milking enough money out of our aging G4 line, don't expect to see much revenue form ProCare for a few quarters and can't deliver on the popular iPod Mini so we figured we'd squeeze a few dollars from the faithful who populate Mac rumor sites. Apple is taking an open source approach to licensing the term and will only charge US $.99 per use of the term. Payment wil be handled through the iTunes Music Store."

The term is frequently used by the faithful in the hopes that Apple will get off its arse and update its product line. Apple has a history of releasing product on Tuesday's although most can't remember the last time.

Still up in the air is whether or not Apple also trademarked "el martes próximo", "folgender Dienstag", le mardi prochain" and other popular iterations.

SpaceMagic

Apr 5, 2004, 05:22 AM

Wow :) Can I just say - don't all SANs have EMBEDDED OSes???? Wouldn't this mean an Embedded version of OS X, which could mean great things!

Look at Lacie's, or HP's SANs, They BOTH have embedded XP or embedded Sun - could this mean apple is making an embedded os - which could be used for phones? or pdas?

gekko513

Apr 5, 2004, 05:51 AM

Woohoo a new rumor!! Does this mean new PowerMacs tomorrow? :p

AmigoMac

Apr 5, 2004, 05:55 AM

Woohoo a new rumor!! Does this mean new PowerMacs tomorrow? :p

I hope this is a kind of bag/case for the PB's G5 coming tomorrow!...

Someone has to say that in a thread!... :rolleyes: :D

:eek:

eddyg

Apr 5, 2004, 07:14 AM

Well, if they are referring to Storage Area Network, the XServe RAID will be used to deploy this.

A SAN is used to share storage volumes among multiple systems. For example, we use a SAN, connected via Fibre Channel, between two servers to keep a high availability database cluster running.

The only thing they need now is Fibre Channel switches to connect multiple XServe RAID units to multiple XServes. I think currently you can only connect one XServe to an XServe RAID.

No, not Fibre Channel, go iSCSI! That way you can connect your SAN to your G5's whatever via GigE and run iSCSI over the top. OSX 10.4 will then contain iSCSI drivers built in, and Apple will once again be in front of the pack w.r.t. SANs.

Cheers, Edward.

tomf87

Apr 5, 2004, 07:37 AM

No, not Fibre Channel, go iSCSI! That way you can connect your SAN to your G5's whatever via GigE and run iSCSI over the top. OSX 10.4 will then contain iSCSI drivers built in, and Apple will once again be in front of the pack w.r.t. SANs.

Cheers, Edward.

You are reffering to NAS (Network Attached Storage), not SAN (Storage Area Network). As someone mentioned above about embedded OS'es, that also refers to NAS. And GigE cannot move as much traffic as 2Gb fiber.

SAN's are essentially a separate network that allows multiple systems to use multiple array volumes for fault tolerant systems. Let's say you have a production database that has to be up all the time. The servers would connect to your Ethernet network and they would also have Fibre Channel cards in them. The FC cards would each connect to a FC switch, and the arrays would connect to each FC switch as well. This gives fault tolerance for all of the connections.

eddyg

Apr 5, 2004, 07:46 AM

You are reffering to NAS (Network Attached Storage), not SAN (Storage Area Network). As someone mentioned above about embedded OS'es, that also refers to NAS. And GigE cannot move as much traffic as 2Gb fiber.

Umm actually no, I was referring to SAN, block level access to disks via iSCSI over IP. All of the benefits of Fibre Channel without the hassle and cost of FC cards.

As for SAN switches, those exist for iSCSI as well.

Yes GigE is "only" 1Gb/s, but that's not exactly slow for most applications.

Cheers, Edward.

tomf87

Apr 5, 2004, 07:57 AM

Umm actually no, I was referring to SAN, block level access to disks via iSCSI over IP. All of the benefits of Fibre Channel without the hassle and cost of FC cards.

As for SAN switches, those exist for iSCSI as well.

Yes GigE is "only" 1Gb/s, but that's not exactly slow for most applications.

Cheers, Edward.

The 1Gb/s is nice, but if you run it over the same switches that will be used for other access as well, you can hit the ceiling pretty quick.

eddyg

Apr 5, 2004, 08:07 AM

The 1Gb/s is nice, but if you run it over the same switches that will be used for other access as well, you can hit the ceiling pretty quick.

Agreed, I don't think that is usually supported though. Generally you'd use an iSCSI SAN switch between the servers and the storage, same as for Fibre Channel. In fact everything is the same as for Fibre Channel except it uses a different protocol and standard network interfaces.

Take a look at
link (http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/press/index.php?article=storage073003) for an overview (just googled).

Cheers, Edward

tomf87

Apr 5, 2004, 08:37 AM

Agreed, I don't think that is usually supported though. Generally you'd use an iSCSI SAN switch between the servers and the storage, same as for Fibre Channel. In fact everything is the same as for Fibre Channel except it uses a different protocol and standard network interfaces.

Take a look at
link (http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/press/index.php?article=storage073003) for an overview (just googled).

Cheers, Edward

Ahh... The old light bulb went off in my head... I thought you meant over switches used for regular network access. That makes much more sense now!

Thanks for the link.

Tom

Rod Rod

Apr 5, 2004, 09:34 AM

macridah

Apr 5, 2004, 09:57 AM

Wow ... apple is really stepping up their efforts to enter the enterprise market. Bravo Apple! I heard of many companies buying a few xserves and xraids to try out at first, then they buy more and more. With a possible SAN product coming up, I see apple a serious contender for enterprise contracts when CIO's get their IT budget back.

AidenShaw

Apr 5, 2004, 09:59 AM

With its own SAN, wouldn't Apple make Final Cut Pro as flexible as Avid for multiple editors working on the same media (and the media all being stored in one place)? If so this would be awesome for Apple.

You'd need a cluster (SAN) file system - the SAN gives all the computers physical access to the disks.

The systems need to coordinate access to the data, however - otherwise files will be overwritten and the data will be seriously corrupted in very short order.

Rod Rod

Apr 5, 2004, 10:13 AM

You'd need a cluster (SAN) file system - the SAN gives all the computers physical access to the disks.

The systems need to coordinate access to the data, however - otherwise files will be overwritten and the data will be seriously corrupted in very short order.

Since FCP is nondestructive, the original media files wouldn't be modified by multiple editors working from the same material. The hard part data-wise is FCP's handling of render files.

So Apple has to sort that and probably other issues out. Once Apple has a tapeless newsroom system that works as well or better than Avid and Sony's solutions, and costs way less, that will be great.

Accessing feed tapes without ever touching the tapes is very powerful. It gives newswriters more time to write scripts more tighty to video, or (typically) time to write a higher volume of scripts.

Rustus Maximus

Apr 5, 2004, 10:31 AM

Perhaps it has something to do with this little announcement from ATTO...

ATTO announces... (http://www.macnn.com/news/24097)

Uragon

Apr 5, 2004, 10:41 AM

Woohoo a new rumor!! Does this mean new PowerMacs tomorrow? :p

No, on 13Apr...
:o

GregA

Apr 5, 2004, 05:23 PM

2 things I've been wondering about that relate to a faster way of moving and sharing data between systems.

One is that in an office environment (with 5, 10, or 100 computers) many of the systems come with 40GB or bigger hard disks, but often that space goes unused as the user data is stored on the network server for backup. Could Apple (or any OS) take advantage of all that unused, distributed storage space and dynamically allocate it to a redundant "virtual network drive".
Perhaps as a starter - if MacOS X Server had 2x50 GB hard disks, instead of sharing a mirrored 50GB volume (for redundancy) it could serve 100GB and use other computers to store the 2nd copy of the data. When a user requested data, perhaps it could come from any part of the distributed source. Would you call that a SAN?

The other is the XGrid capability of being used for video compression etc. A faster network connectivity is needed to make that worthwhile - could the technology used for XSAN (higher speed data paths etc) help for clustered applications too?

Greg
ps.
To the person who said they looked forward to Apple's SAN being cheaper than Sony's or Avid's - do you really think they would make it cheaper? I hope you're right... but...!

msbsound

Apr 5, 2004, 09:14 PM

tomf87

Apr 5, 2004, 11:11 PM

I would love to see apple attempt a san system. But realistically, it would be through the roof. A two system san setup for our post production suites was just quoted at around $16,000 and that was for about a terabyte. Still I would love to see someone else in this market!

That's a cheap SAN! We bought a two controller SAN, each with 1GB of cache, with two fibre channel 2Gb switches, 4 fibre channel cards, 4 2 meter fibre cables, 720GB of disk space, and 28 Ultra320 drive slots for $60,000.

Which SAN manufacturer did you get that quote from?

caylan

Apr 6, 2004, 12:23 AM

I'm going to step up to the plate here and offer my $.02 on this issue, seeing that I'm the unix administrator at a large university, apple just sent me a dual-g4 xserve, xserve-raid filled full to 3.5TB (512+512 cache, the whole works), and I just got back from Compellent located in Minneapolis playing with various SANs/NAS solutions. Yea... this patent is big freaking news for me!

I contacted apple a month ago and they were happy to send me "something to test samba/nfs/openldap technology in panther server" on... First thing that happened was a visit from 2 reps from apple wearing really weird sunglasses and dark suits...

On the phone, my apple "rep" told me that they were going to be able to score an xserve/raid unit for testing.

Last Friday, I got an email from our helpdesk stating with an empty body, but in the subject line was written, "your mac stuff is here."

To my amazement the label on the xserve-raid said "(512+512, 3500GB)."

Nevermind...

tomf87

Apr 6, 2004, 02:03 AM

...Simply put, I was testing another NAS (noteworthy comment, the xserve raid is NOT an nas/san, it's technically, and IMO a DAS [directly attached storage]) and is not really at the same level as what I was shown/played with this morning at Compellent...PS: I'm 20 years old.

Directly connecting an XServe RAID to any system does not constitute a SAN, but XServe RAID can be deployed in a SAN. It's like saying a system is a client or a server. The system can function as either or both, it just depends on how it is deployed.

Thanks for the age update too.. :) Not really sure why.

caylan

Apr 6, 2004, 02:09 AM

Thanks for the age update too.. :) Not really sure why.

What does it look like? Just a little ego boost. I need it right about now. :eek:

pinguru

Apr 6, 2004, 07:49 AM

tomf87

Apr 6, 2004, 09:23 AM

What does it look like? Just a little ego boost. I need it right about now. :eek:

I was just kidding... Good knowledge you have. :)

tomf87

Apr 6, 2004, 04:30 PM

Can you repeat that? I didn't quite catch on to what you were saying... :D

alanrh

Apr 7, 2004, 02:24 PM

To the person who said they looked forward to Apple's SAN being cheaper than Sony's or Avid's - do you really think they would make it cheaper? I hope you're right... but...!

Considering the lowest cost Avid Unity storage is $40,000 for 2 Ter, and Apple does the same for $12,000, chances are it would be cheaper.

-Alan