* Apple’s Xserve RAID and Xsan are ready for enterprise deployment
Apple’s Xserve RAID and Xsan are ready for enterprise deployment, users said in a crowd-sourcing event last week.
At least those users – advertising agencies, photo post-processing and digital media – say that Apple’s Xserve RAID and its storage-area networking Xsan array have filled in well for storage in their businesses.
Here’s one of the user’s responses.
“Our company has successfully deployed an Xsan installation as the core storage platform for our mortgage-centric document imaging system,” says Steve Rosenhamer, manager of software development for ADFITECH in Edmond, Okla.
“Our Xsan currently consists of three Xserve servers and two Xserve RAID storage units, all connected via fiber through an Emulex Fibre Channel switch,” says Rosenhamer. We also have a second mirror installation at a remote site for disaster recovery purposes, which is kept in sync with our production system on a near real-time basis.”
“Web-based document retrieval applications are used on a daily basis for real-time access to the documents our clients use to process their mortgage loans as well as to support our in-house operations performing quality control audits on mortgage loans from over 300 clients around the nation,” says Rosenhamer.
“Currently, we have about half of a terabyte of data stored, totaling around 20 million individual images. We’ve had our applications in production for about two years now and the Apple hardware and software has performed flawlessly. We’ve only lost one hard drive and that was in the very beginning so we just chalked that up to infant mortality of new hardware.”
“We chose the Apple platform for a couple of reasons. Obviously price was big consideration. At the time we purchased everything, we spent around $50,000 for all the hardware and software and that set us up with 4TB of scalable storage in a SAN environment with redundant metadata controllers. Price out that amount of storage in a scalable SAN platform from any of the most popular vendors and there’s no contest on price, at least there wasn’t two years ago. Secondly, we’ve always been a do it our own way type of shop. We’re a mixed Linux and Mac shop, only using Microsoft products when absolutely necessary. Up to this point we’d only had experience with the Mac desktop products but felt very confident in Apple’s ability to produce solid, reliable, high-performance equipment and software so we were actually kind of excited to get our hands on their server hardware. If I had to make the decision over again, knowing what I know now, I’d make the same decision, it’s been great.”
“We’re about to add another Xserve RAID to the mix to more than double our storage capacity in light of some upcoming projects that will require us to significantly increase the number of documents we have stored past what our original projections were. According to Apple, this should be a simple process, I expect it to go well — we’ll find out shortly.”
You can read the rest here.
