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.
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.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.
I don't think that's the case. OSXS has several solid markets.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.
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.
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.
-SubGenius
And that's why enterprise I.T. hates Apple.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.
...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.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.
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.
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.
http://www.apple.com/uk/xserve/raid/ -XServe RAID
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.