Xserve RAID Discontinued?

[mkwilson68]

I really hope this is temporary

The XServe RAID is a really excellent product - everyone I know who has one (myself included) are very happy with them, and compared them to many others before choosing them. I'd be surprised, given the importance of the video markets (and XSan) to Apple if it went away - it makes it harder for them to sell turnkey solutions.

Hopefully, this is just the prelude to an update - it is a product that has remained largely unchanged for quite a while.

 

[Toe]

All of Apple's transitions are sudden - for example when one day the PowerMac had only PCI-X slots, and the next day it had only PCI Express slots. A real shock for those people with specialized PCI-X cards.

In the rest of the Intel world, systems usually have both PCI and PCIe slots, or they give you the option of PCI-X or PCIe - the transition is less jarring.

You can still get new Xserves with one PCI-X riser and one PCI-e (or two PCI-e).

For me, who hadn't been following the evolution of PCI, the jarring part was distinguishing between "PCI X" and the almost identical sounding "PCI Express." The former sounds like an abbreviation of the latter.

 

[Chisholm]

The floor of NAB is littered with folks offering SAN solutions. A TerraBlock rep came for a demo last week and a compelling feature he mentioned was the almost instant formatting of the drives. All the editors in the room had a collective gasp.

NAB should be interesting this year with both Avid and Apple not being there. At least they won't be shouting over each other's presentations.

 

[agdickinson]

Xserve raid still available in UK Store

I've been checking and the Xserve RAID is still available in the Apple online UK Store.

The 1Tb has a 6-8 week ship, 3.5Tb 7 days shipping, and 7Tb 7 days shipping, so still looks like there is a lot of inventory in Europe. Just checked also the BTO 10Tb is ready to ship in 7 days too.

So I'm wondering what is happening here?

 

[AidenShaw]

A TerraBlock rep came for a demo last week and a compelling feature he mentioned was the almost instant formatting of the drives. All the editors in the room had a collective gasp.

HP has had this for many years on their internal RAID controllers, as well as fibre - even conversions, you can "instantly" convert a RAID-0 set to a RAID-6 set, for example. (Others have it too...)

Did TerraBlock mention any caveats, such as the real formatting takes place in the background, and performance is a bit off until it's done?

(I assume that you're talking about "formatting" the raw spindles into a volume on the SAN controller, not the "format" (or "mkfs") command at the OS that puts the filesystem meta-data on the volume)

 

[winterspan]

... at least from Apple perspective. I am not sure that the XServe RAID sales were significant and there is no strategic reason for Apple to keep that product alive.

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 think Apple should start supporting 3rd party operating systems on the Xserve (much like how Sun does - sure they would like you to buy Solaris but don't want to lose a sale if you are a Linux or Windows shop) and see the sales picking up - there is nothing lacking in that product apart from OS Vendor Support.

I assume it wouldn't be too hard to run a BSD or Linux distro on the Xserve...
Does anyone have experience doing this? Or know if there is driver support for all the hardware?

 

[bigandy]

sad to see it go - one of my clients has a bunch of them - but i've been thinking this would happen for quite some time. it was really needing an update, and for al the positive points, i guess it just wasn't work investing in the R&D for an updated one.

"Patch Tuesday" is a monthly event, not every two weeks. That bit of exaggeration costs you a lot of credility.... Why not say the truth?

Windows servers also stay up for month after month - one doesn't apply patches for software that's disabled or not used on a server.

very good point, but i must ask, what's credility?

 

[AidenShaw]

...but i must ask, what's credility?

Something that you don't get by making a statement that's well known to be untrue.

------

...just noticed the typo, sorry!

(Google gets 1600 hits on "credility", and Yahoo gets 2060... Unfortunately dictionary.com gets 0 )

 

[Amuraivel]

credulity
believability

 

[Chisholm]

HP has had this for many years on their internal RAID controllers, as well as fibre - even conversions, you can "instantly" convert a RAID-0 set to a RAID-6 set, for example. (Others have it too...)

Did TerraBlock mention any caveats, such as the real formatting takes place in the background, and performance is a bit off until it's done?

(I assume that you're talking about "formatting" the raw spindles into a volume on the SAN controller, not the "format" (or "mkfs") command at the OS that puts the filesystem meta-data on the volume)

Well, the words came out of the salesman's mouth and the engineer didn't correct him. I have a general mistrust for salesmen when peddling expensive SANs to editors that know nothing of how hardware works. I suppose if you whip an engineer enough they will become compliant and keep their mouth shut.

There was no mention of anything in the background. I fortunately had an important phone call (ahem) and had to leave 10 minutes into the demo.

 

[morespce54]

...It's basically a product that other companies that focus on this type of technology can do cheaper and better than Apple.

Yeah, like, I don't know, compters! just kidding!

 

[AidenShaw]

Well, the words came out of the salesman's mouth and the engineer didn't correct him. I have a general mistrust for salesmen when peddling expensive SANs to editors that know nothing of how hardware works. I suppose if you whip an engineer enough they will become compliant and keep their mouth shut.

There was no mention of anything in the background. I fortunately had an important phone call (ahem) and had to leave 10 minutes into the demo.

My point is just that the "format these 32 drives into two RAID-6 volumes with 4 hot spares" command is "instant" on many RAID arrays and controllers.

"Instant" in the sense that the volume can have a filesystem put on it and used right away. It will take some time for the volume to reach full performance, though.

RAID-0 can be truly instant - but any RAID with redundancy or parity must either be written to a known consistent state, or the controller must keep track of where data has been written and "do the right thing". The HP controllers do both - in the background the entire volume is written, but it "does the right thing" with read/write requests that come in while the formatting is in progress.

 

[parapup]

I assume it wouldn't be too hard to run a BSD or Linux distro on the Xserve...
Does anyone have experience doing this? Or know if there is driver support for all the hardware?

Sure Linux can be made to run on any hardware - but that wasn't my point. I was talking about Linux/Solaris/Windows as supported OSes on the Xserve. For example if you look at Sun's x64 servers - they sell you Solaris pre-installed but you could also buy certified and supported Windows and Linux OSes for that hardware.

For businesses the support and certification is crucial.

 

[Toe]

(Google gets 1600 hits on "credility", and Yahoo gets 2060... Unfortunately dictionary.com gets 0 )

Here I was thinking maybe it was a Scottish spelling or something... I'll bet you could have gotten away with that.

 

[AidenShaw]

Here I was thinking maybe it was a Scottish spelling or something... I'll bet you could have gotten away with that.

But wouldn't I lose credility if I tried (and was caught)?

 

[drsmithy]

I mean why not give people an <i>option</i> of other more mainstream OSes - there is no point in forcing OS X Server on people if it cannot work for them. (The problems aren't just performance and stability related - software availability is also a big thing.)

Why would you buy an Xserve except to run OS X ?

 

[AidenShaw]

Why would you buy an Xserve except to run OS X ?

Masochism?

But you have a point - there is so much choice in Intel/AMD rackmount servers, why would one be attracted to one of the handful of SKUs that Apple would sell?

 

[parapup]

Masochism?

Ugh. Give me a break. Running OSX Server would be Masochism for many.

Choice of good hardware is never a bad thing for anyone if supported software is available.
The Xserve is good product which is also competitively priced - so why not?

 

[parapup]

Why would you buy an Xserve except to run OS X ?

As a customer any one would like to have more choices - Xserve would make a good competition even for the saturated x86 server market. The price is right, the design is good - so why not?

 

[Toe]

As a customer any one would like to have more choices - Xserve would make a good competition even for the saturated x86 server market. The price is right, the design is good - so why not?

The industrial design of the Xserve is great, assuming you want a 1u server with no more than three internal drives, and you're not interested in using much in the way of PCI cards.

But presumably some of what you are paying is for OS X Server, which you're going to throw away to install a free OS (or pay again for another OS?). The Xserve seems like a good value, but I doubt many people buy it to run other OSes.

However, I can imagine that people who buy a lot of non-Apple servers might buy some Xserves to run specific applications on OS X Server. The configuration of Leopard Server is awfully simple compared to many Linux implementations. If a high-paid technician has to set up a server for several hours, was it really worth the few bucks saved on the hardware? They could just buy an Xserve and have a robust wiki server (or whatever) in a ten minutes (plus software updates).

 

[Toe]

But wouldn't I lose credility if I tried (and was caught)?

Good point. The internet is a highly-backed-up archive of everything everyone has posted to it.

That's something society (including myself) hasn't fully grasped, I suppose.

 

[AidenShaw]

The industrial design of the Xserve is great, assuming you want a 1u server with no more than three internal drives, and you're not interested in using much in the way of PCI cards.

"Styling" isn't on the check list for most server purchases.

A ProLiant DL360g5 is a 1U server with six drive slots, builtin RAID with 256 MiB cache and battery backup, iSCSI acceleration built into two GbE NICs, and a bunch of other availability features.

Even better, it has a 2U brother - the DL380g5. Basically the same motherboard, but 8 internal drives and up to 5 slots.

Need more, then the DL580g5. 16 core (quad quads), upto 256 GiB RAM, 16 internal drives, eight slots standard: (4) full length PCI-E x8, (1) full length PCI-E x4 and (3) half length PCI-E x4 slots; optional card adds (3) PCI-X or (3) PCI-E x8.

There's even a smaller brother, the DL320g5. This is a cheaper 1U or 2U with a single socket.

The point isn't to knock the Xserve itself, but to show how limited Apple's choices are. Having a compatible family of machines is an important purchasing factor for many companies. People expenses are higher than machine costs, and people get more done when all the systems look and act the same, and share common parts (hot swap disks, PCIe cards, memory,...) and utilities.

Apple's not going to get far into the enterprise by offering a single reasonably-priced mid-range 1U server - regardless of its merits.

It's clear that Apple's Xserve main target is the people who want rack-mount OSX workstations for render farms (embarrassingly parallel grid applications), and those looking for a strong file/web server for OSX-based design workgroups. It's good for those, but it's not going to break open the glass computer room.

And their sudden product cancellations and redirections won't help either. How would you like to be running the Virginia Tech cluster now with its 1100 PowerPC Xserves?

 

[greentree_uk]

End of Xraid, end of displays too?

well Like others the End of the current xraid has long been on the cards. I always expected a new xraid to come along. Apple brought to us a cheap at the time, affordable raid solution that was guaranteed to work with Apple machines. as a Reseller it also brought part availability to us. these raid boxes are not cheap and i'm sure a spare parts kit isn't either! I knew RAID 6 is going to be needed. large volumes of data need that redundancy. The Xserve RAID brought true raid solutions to places it hadn't been before and for that I'm thankful. However I am concerned that like the RAID Apple's cinema Displays are also an ageing breed. will apple dump these aswell? am I the only one who sees the similarity?

 

[MikeTheC]

My guess is that this is a stop-gap measure. It'll give them the time to re-assess whether or not this is a market they feel they can likely compete in and win.

However, at this point most of the people and companies I know who have and run servers are either using Linux or Win2xxx Server solutions, and not anything from Apple. I think they missed the point that what the server market seems to want is either cheap hardware in large volume, or premium-priced solutions with the premium price point due to 24x7 on-call service and support, not "designer-label" pricing.

There's no denying Apple's enclosures are beautiful and some of the most visually pleasing, but (no offense) IT and MIS folk aren't exactly known for their aesthetic sensibilities.

 

[AidenShaw]

My guess is that this is a stop-gap measure. It'll give them the time to re-assess whether or not this is a market they feel they can likely compete in and win.

However, at this point most of the people and companies I know who have and run servers are either using Linux or Win2xxx Server solutions, and not anything from Apple. I think they missed the point that what the server market seems to want is either cheap hardware in large volume, or premium-priced solutions with the premium price point due to 24x7 on-call service and support, not "designer-label" pricing.

I believe that this is a permanent exit from the SAN storage business - for all the reasons in your second paragraph.

Partnering with a company that specializes in storage is a smart move - it's just part of Apple's transition from a computer company to an electronic gadget company.

There's no denying Apple's enclosures are beautiful and some of the most visually pleasing, but (no offense) IT and MIS folk aren't exactly known for their aesthetic sensibilities.

And those who do have an artistic flair don't see the point in considering "stying" in a device that will be in a rack in a locked computer room.