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Will_reed

macrumors 6502
May 27, 2005
289
0
I hope they bring them back in a newer better form or something cause I always wanted an Xserve RAID just never had the cash to get one.
Those Promise things look too generic.
 

Unspeaked

macrumors 68020
Dec 29, 2003
2,448
1
West Coast
Though I agree it's a bad thing the XRAID is gone, I don't understand the arguments that it was so great looking and the Promise solution isn't.

These are server components we're talking about. 9 times out of 10 - maybe more - they're in a rack somewhere in some closet or server room and never seen by human eyes.

This isn't an iMac or MacBook that gets looked at constantly. I don't really care what my RAID looks like, as long as it works.

That being said, the XRAID works pretty well :)
 

57004

Cancelled
Aug 18, 2005
1,022
341
I had a hard time finding it on their site a month ago like they were hiding it. I must have bought about the last one.

It is beautiful with all it's lights on but NOISY.

All big Raid arrays are noisy. Packing so many fast and hot drives together with only tiny gaps between them for cooling needs some serious cooling fans.. The Dell Powervaults we have at work are the exact same.

Too bad Apple's dropping them though, they really look well with the xServe.
 

Virgil-TB2

macrumors 65816
Aug 3, 2007
1,143
1
Yup. For its lack of adaptability (still ATA drives, maxed out at 750 per, when SATA goes to 1TB and beyond, and no SAS; 2GB/s Fibre Channel (when you could get a 4GB card), etc), it was still pretty inexpensive per-GB and worked well with ADIC's Stornext (what XSan is based on) on other platforms.

At NC State, a few years ago, they home-built a Linux cluster practically for the change they found in the lounge sofas in the CS buildings, and they used XServe RAIDs for storage.
The thing that bugs me the most about this story (if it's true), is the feeling it gives you that *all* Apple of products are just a coin toss away from being discontinued. It really rocks one's faith in the company in general, when you hear of products that weren't really in trouble, disappearing without warning.

The optics on this is that Apple is prepared to chuck pretty much any product that doesn't give them a market leader position with a huge margin to boot. If they can discontinue the X-Serve Raid, then anything they make could be gone tomorrow; not because it's not making money, but because it's not making enough money or isn't the very best in it's class.

That is exceedingly unsettling.
 

Toe

macrumors 65816
Mar 25, 2002
1,101
2
Wonder they will do the same thing for XServe itself? Sure it is a nicely designed product with reasonable price but not many people want to run OS X Server - compatibility, performance, training reasons etc.
I don't think that's the case. OSXS has several solid markets.

First, it and the Xserve are a great way for a small business to grow and keep their Macs that they started out on (and to hire more non-technical staff before they have to start ramping up an I.T. department). Just like Apple did in the education market, they are getting businesses when they are young. That's a solid long-term strategy.

For bigger businesses, OSXS is a nice flavor of unix that runs on really solid hardware from a leading manufacturer. Most enterprises aren't ready to fill all their racks with Xserves, but they can certainly see benefits to running some Xserves or some clusters of them.

OSXS is also a fantastic workgroup server for graphics and multimedia departments. I imagine that's where the majority of OSXS implementations are.
 

tivoli2

macrumors regular
May 29, 2007
182
0
My own little world...
The thing that bugs me the most about this story (if it's true), is the feeling it gives you that *all* Apple of products are just a coin toss away from being discontinued. It really rocks one's faith in the company in general, when you hear of products that weren't really in trouble, disappearing without warning.

The optics on this is that Apple is prepared to chuck pretty much any product that doesn't give them a market leader position with a huge margin to boot. If they can discontinue the X-Serve Raid, then anything they make could be gone tomorrow; not because it's not making money, but because it's not making enough money or isn't the very best in it's class.

That is exceedingly unsettling.

Does anyone think this has any real implications or foreshadowing for professional level Apple technology, or am I just being a nervous ninny? Don't want to turn this into an "i"gadgets rant, I'm just saying I've been nervous since the whole iPhone thing and how it seemingly pushed all else to the sidelines. Hopefully I'm mistaken and my perceptions are unwarranted. :confused:
 

guzhogi

macrumors 68040
Aug 31, 2003
3,725
1,804
Wherever my feet take me…
I disagree, I have a Xsan deployment at work that I admin. And let me tell ya, no matter how much storage you give your end users, they will fill it. So switching to a Storage System that allows for direct expansion of the Raid Sub System instead of the switch just ROCKS!

Steve Jobs must love the enterprise!. When I had the max number of XServe Raids on my Q-logic switch, i got to go spend another 5K on a second switch and then 600 on another set of interconnect cables. Now you can just add to the Sub System and from the looks of it (i have not read the detailed tech specs yet) it maybe being done via ESAS as expansion, thus the 12Gb back plane to the expansion subsystem.

So to sum this up, the 18K I spent a year ago to a a Xserve Raid and switches, would now be just a Expansion Chassis with drives. That 5K for the switch would become more storage, not more cables and points of failure.

The only thing I wish that apple would do, is alter the pricing scheme for the Xsan Software Package, for ever Node an extra 1000$. When your a MTV or Universal that maybe fine, but when your a start up, that can hurt to add 12 editors to your San.

:cool:
-SubGenius

Good point, but, if true, why didn't Apple do that with the xServe RAID?
 

foidulus

macrumors 6502a
Jan 15, 2007
904
1
Yet another reason why corporate uptake of Apple is slow

Not so much what they did(I will have to wait to get my hands on one to really comment on the efficacy of the move) but how they did it. No warnings, they just completely stopped selling the old model and announced the new model which is different enough that it could cause headaches. One of the biggest differences seems to be monitoring the thing. They each have a built in web server(which makes me cringe when I think of the potential security implications) and are probably not compatible with the old RAID admin software.

So now companies that used Apples products either have to scramble to make sure they have all the RAIDs they are going to need for a while or commit resources to testing and implementing the new ones that they previously did not think they needed. The same kind of thing happens all the time on the consumer end, but consumers put up with it because they really like Apple's products and the difference in terms of user experience and testing between today's iMac and the next gen are minimal. However, many corporate users like to plan things out years in advance and have to throughly test all new products. They cannot just throw new RAID systems into the mix willy nilly because Apple felt like today was a good day to do so.

Just more evidence that Apple is doing everything in its power to drive corporate customers AWAY from their products....
 

Toe

macrumors 65816
Mar 25, 2002
1,101
2
The thing that bugs me the most about this story (if it's true), is the feeling it gives you that *all* Apple of products are just a coin toss away from being discontinued. It really rocks one's faith in the company in general, when you hear of products that weren't really in trouble, disappearing without warning.

The optics on this is that Apple is prepared to chuck pretty much any product that doesn't give them a market leader position with a huge margin to boot. If they can discontinue the X-Serve Raid, then anything they make could be gone tomorrow; not because it's not making money, but because it's not making enough money or isn't the very best in it's class.

That is exceedingly unsettling.
And that's why enterprise I.T. hates Apple.

It seems like the only solution is for Apple to make Apple Enterprise a major division of the company, almost but not quite separate from the rest of the iApple brand. That (sub)company would have to be much more open about product timelines. It would need it's own limited line of (low-cost, low-feature, expandable) hardware so that they don't have to reveal what's coming up in the consumer line of hardware. And it would have to branch OS X Server further from Client so that they could be forthcoming about the future of Server without giving away too much about Client.

And it also seems like Apple just isn't going to make Apple Enterprise anything but a minor branch of their sales department. Because they aren't ready to make that big of a commitment to Enterprise when they get so much more money from the consumer market. And they don't want consumers buying cheapo/utilitarian business Macs.

That's a shame, since they have such a kickass server system. Everything they have (with the extremely notable exception of low-cost client computers) makes for an incredibly appealing enterprise lineup. OS X Server's unlimited-users-for-everything license makes it vastly more appealing than Windows for so many applications. Not to mention the stability, the full UNIX compliance, the great suite of bundled applications, the security, and the excellent hardware to run it all on.
 

Nicky G

macrumors 65816
Mar 24, 2002
1,146
1,282
Baltimore
The Xserve RAID was already a dead product, it was several years behind the curve technology-wise, and was an embarrassment to Apple in the pro markets. They should have done something like this years ago -- find a good, cutting-edge manufacturer of fibre channel RAIDs to "qualify" for Xsan, and move on. I am psyched, I will sell a ton of these to my clients. Finally I can feel really good about Xsan again. And Xsan 2.0 hopefully will be very nice, just the Spotlight support has been much-needed for a long time. I pray it's not too buggy.
 

gcliv

macrumors member
Feb 19, 2008
38
12
Wow this is really rough for me. I'm an IT Manager for a manufacturing company and I love the snot out of my XServe RAID unit. I have it connected to a Dell 1U server. I was just getting ready to fill up the rest of the slots in out first one and budget for a second one in the next 6-9 months.
 

Toe

macrumors 65816
Mar 25, 2002
1,101
2
Not to mention the stability, the full UNIX compliance, the great suite of bundled applications, the security, and the excellent hardware to run it all on.
...which apparently doesn't include the Xserve RAID anymore. :) Seeing as it was Ultra-ATA, I guess it was getting rather long in the tooth.
 

BenRoethig

macrumors 68030
Jul 17, 2002
2,729
0
Dubuque, Iowa
And that's why enterprise I.T. hates Apple.

It seems like the only solution is for Apple to make Apple Enterprise a major division of the company, almost but not quite separate from the rest of the iApple brand. That (sub)company would have to be much more open about product timelines. It would need it's own limited line of (low-cost, low-feature, expandable) hardware so that they don't have to reveal what's coming up in the consumer line of hardware. And it would have to branch OS X Server further from Client so that they could be forthcoming about the future of Server without giving away too much about Client.

And it also seems like Apple just isn't going to make Apple Enterprise anything but a minor branch of their sales department. Because they aren't ready to make that big of a commitment to Enterprise when they get so much more money from the consumer market. And they don't want consumers buying their cheapo/utilitarian business Macs.

That's a shame, since they have such a kickass server system. Everything they have (with the extremely notable exception of low-cost client computers) makes for an incredibly appealing enterprise lineup. The unlimited-users-for-everything license for OS X Server makes it vastly more appealing than Windows for so many applications. Not to mention the stability, the full UNIX compliance, the great suite of bundled applications, the security, and the excellent hardware to run it all on.

To be honest, I've been thinking Apple should have have an independent professional brand for a while now. Jobs and Ive are the masters at pretty looking consumer machines, but their approach doesn't work with Pros.
 

Sayer

macrumors 6502a
Jan 4, 2002
981
0
Austin, TX
Makes sense. I am sure there was a lot of pushback from Enterprise/Science customers about having to use Xserve RAID or some such nonsense. Single-vendor solutions usually get frowned upon in the big leagues (unless that vendor is Microsoft).

So why spend the Hardware R&D resources (time/money/people) on a niche product for a niche platform when there are tons of other vendors that you can support through software and open(-ish) standards?

Mac users are funny; they piss and moan when Apple makes an end-to-end solution (iTunes MS, iPod, iPhone) and then piss and moan when Apple realizes it can better serve customers by providing open, compatible solutions that work with lots of 3rd party hardware vendors *cough* Xsan 2 *cough*.

Crazy stuff.
 

foidulus

macrumors 6502a
Jan 15, 2007
904
1
And that's why enterprise I.T. hates Apple.

It seems like the only solution is for Apple to make Apple Enterprise a major division of the company, almost but not quite separate from the rest of the iApple brand. That (sub)company would have to be much more open about product timelines. It would need it's own limited line of (low-cost, low-feature, expandable) hardware so that they don't have to reveal what's coming up in the consumer line of hardware. And it would have to branch OS X Server further from Client so that they could be forthcoming about the future of Server without giving away too much about Client.

And it also seems like Apple just isn't going to make Apple Enterprise anything but a minor branch of their sales department. Because they aren't ready to make that big of a commitment to Enterprise when they get so much more money from the consumer market. And they don't want consumers buying their cheapo/utilitarian business Macs.

That's a shame, since they have such a kickass server system. Everything they have (with the extremely notable exception of low-cost client computers) makes for an incredibly appealing enterprise lineup. OS X Server's unlimited-users-for-everything license makes it vastly more appealing than Windows for so many applications. Not to mention the stability, the full UNIX compliance, the great suite of bundled applications, the security, and the excellent hardware to run it all on.

It isn't the price that really bothers me, its the fact that Apple seems to value secrecy above everything else, even in cases where secrecy makes about 0 sense, like here. I mean, how much would Apple have actually lost if they decided a few months ago to give enterprise users a warning, "We are transitioning away from the XServe RAIDs, for the next 3 months, or while supplies last, we will still sell the RAIDs, but are transitioning to the Promise VTrack RAID system." and sold both side by side for a few months. Instead, Apple has this culture of secrecy for secrecy's sake, and it doesn't seem to matter to them how many customers they alienate, as long as they can maintain secrecy.

That will always be the #1 reason why you will not see Apple's corporate offerings get more than a sliver of the market. After all my experiences with Apple's corporate stuff, I will never EVER recommend an Apple product to be used as a server or anything else for that matter. If they want to play games, they can play games without my money or my customer's money.

I can live with the expense, I can live with the limited selections of workstations, but I cannot live with being unable to plan out more than a week in advance because Apple might arbitrarily change something tomorrow seemingly because they just feel like it.
 

iFrankie

macrumors member
Jul 12, 2003
78
0
We have two maxed out Xserve RAIDs in our server cabinets. They are awesome.

It's a sad day for Apple if they stop selling this great product.
 

MacCapt

macrumors newbie
Feb 19, 2008
1
0
Off Apple's site

Xsan 2. The SAN file system for Mac OS X.
- http://www.apple.com/xsan/
biggest feature: MultiSAN
- Now a single workstation or server can access multiple Xsan volumes simultaneously.
- Each volume is independently hosted, so a failure of any one volume does not affect another.
- Users can copy data between Xsan volumes directly over Fibre Channel.
- Spotlight support
- pricing the same
- qualified RAID list is not yet up but will include Promise to start
- http://www.apple.com/xsan/features/multisan.html
 

ChrisA

macrumors G5
Jan 5, 2006
12,541
1,653
Redondo Beach, California
I think economy of scale drove this. This is just a box and power and an interface. Apple really had nothing to offer. Boxes don't run software or do much. So an Apple branded box does not do anything special. They are likely better off partnering with a 3rd party.
 

foidulus

macrumors 6502a
Jan 15, 2007
904
1
I think economy of scale drove this. This is just a box and power and an interface. Apple really had nothing to offer. Boxes don't run software or do much. So an Apple branded box does not do anything special. They are likely better off partnering with a 3rd party.

Actually Apple had some really nice RAID admin tools, made it easy to monitor lots of RAIDs at once, and had some really nice status lights that allowed you to monitor the RAID just by looking at it(you could also estimate how hard it was being hit)

From what I read on the product description page, the monitoring software for the new RAID is web based, and it doesn't look like the status lights are as nice....

No idea if it will be compatible with Apple's RAID admin software.
 

simag

macrumors newbie
Jan 14, 2008
7
0
Xsan is third party.
Storage is now third party.
A virtual OSX server has been demo-ed on VMware/Parallels.

Prediction: Xraid will go too and be replaced by a "virtual appliance" which will run on generic Intel hardware. While I'd tend to think a vendor such as Sun might be the partner of choice, it could be some other unknown small time player like Promise. Yesterday would have been a good day to buy into Promise.
 

bazzers

macrumors newbie
Feb 19, 2008
2
0
a sign that ZFS is coming?

Could this be a sign that ZFS is coming to Xserve after a revamp? I think existing Xserve's can't run ZFS. But ZFS is wonderfully easy to admin, and is unique among file systems with "end-to-end data integrity" via plenty of checksumming.
Check this comment from Apple on ZFS and storage...
From:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199903525
====
ZFS "is only available a read-only option from the command line," according to an Apple spokesperson.

In a follow-up interview today, [Brian] Croll [Croll, senior director of Mac OS X Product Marketing] explained, "ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS -- a read-only copy of ZFS -- in Leopard."
[...]
Asked whether ZFS might be implemented for Apple's Xserve rack mountable server line, Croll said, "Where we head in the future, we're not able to talk about.
====
 
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