* Apple storage options
My friends often refer to one part of my basement as a tribute to trailing edge technology.
I don’t keep a PDP 10 there like a guy I once knew has in his basement, but there is lots of other stuff that a few folks with a sense of history might appreciate. I still have the remains of the first in-home network I built, circa 1990 (operant rule: it must cost no more than $10 to add a node to the twisted pair cabling), plus other bits and pieces from my first home-built array (four MFM drives, totaling about 50M bytes – all courtesy of the monthly Flea at MIT swapfest). And behind the old bikes, sitting on the same shelf as the dusty food processor that we haven’t used in years, is an old Apple Macintosh (actually, a Mac Plus) that dates back to a startup I set up around 1990.
The Mac is the first example of which I am aware of a machine that put SCSI on a home desktop (this had been preceded by a few years worth of internal SCSI on technical workstations). The SCSI disk drive was external, connected to the Mac itself through a SCSI cable thick enough to have been used as a collar for a Rottweiller. And the connector was… well, it was pretty big.
Times changed, SCSI connectors got smaller, and Apple’s star waned. Eventually most of us who were confirmed Apple bigots started making sheepish references to Darth Vader and The Dark Side, and began to use PCs. And most Macintoshes were consigned to basements.
Apple never went away however, and as technology changed so did the company. Its markets for desktop machine are much wider than ever before, and it is now aiming at enterprise markets as well. More to the point, Apple is making a serious play for both the small-and-midsize business and the enterprise storage markets.
Apple’s Xserve RAID is a 3U rack storage system that at present scales up to 5.6T bytes capacity. If you haven’t looked at Apple for a while, be prepared to see several unexpected things at the company’s Web site. First, the old idea of paying a premium for the elegance of an Apple solution seems not to be a part of the Apple marketing plan. Xserve storage is priced as low as $2.32 per gigabyte.
Second, Apple supports heterogeneous environments, including Cisco and SuSE Linux, and has optimized the Xserve system to work with its Xsan (storage-area networking) file system. This may come as a big shock to those of you who remember the old Apple closed architecture and go-it-alone philosophy, but it is quite clear that Xserve is prepared to play nicely with others in the data center.
Finally, Apple has partnered with Emulex and others to make life a bit easier for those of you who want to move from direct-attached storage to a SAN for the first time, but who may have found yourselves priced out of the market up until now. For example, SMB users can implement the Emulex 355 and 375 switches (12- and 20-port switches for Fibre Channel SANs, specifically designed for entry-level SANs). Emulex seems to pride itself on ease of installation and ease of management, which should map quite nicely to a market that needs the efficiencies that a SAN can deliver but lack the technical expertise that most SANs require.
Xserve RAID starts out at $6,000 for a terabyte of RAID 0 storage. The suggested price for a 5.6T-byte system is $13,000.
Check out Apple’s Xserve RAID at http://www.apple.com, and search for “Xserve RAID.” To learn about Emulex’s entry-level SAN switches, see http://www.emulex.com
