appleinsider.com — AppleInsider appears have gotten their hands on photos of an unreleased version of Apple's Xserve RAID storage solution -- codenamed Q57 -- that uses SATA drives instead of ATA drives and packs 6 fibre channels instead of two. It's reportedly running version 2.0d32 dev/A3.10 of the device firmware, rather than version 1.5.
Jan 19, 2007 View in Crawl 4
saxjazman9Jan 20, 2007
Does anyone else ever shiver when you put SATA drives in a server??? come'n apple... SATA... why?? don't you ever wanna play with the big boys???
slicktoJan 20, 2007
These things aren't cheap either. The current system starts at $6000!, and that's only for 1TB. Typical price $10,000+No thanks. I can buy more storage, with better quality from someone else, for that price.
nsresponderJan 20, 2007
If that unit is really Q57, then it's rather old. The original Mac Mini was Q88. When did SATA first hit the market?-jcr
abstractrudeJan 20, 2007
SlicktoWhere can you find a SAN with more storage for less price? Apple is easily the best priced SAN you can buy. As for the guy who lost data onhis RAID, you should always have a hot spare in an enterprise environment, plus at least tape backups. YES, people are still doing tape backups. Remember the XserveRAID is an enterprise level option, not some ATA drives thrown into a $75 firewire enclosure. checkout alienraid.org, there is a place for XserveRAID in enterprise, os X server and xserve is a different story.Your support contracts should have covered the lost drives. You dont buy any SAN without a support contract.Im not a fan boy trying to prop apple, i'm just saying you have no idea what your talking about.p.s. apple enterprise support does suck, i'm sorry you have had to experience it.
geminitojanusJan 20, 2007
"I can't believe apple hasn't had a sata raid setup sooner"Enterprise RAID solutions are significantly more difficult to engineer than putting a SATA controller on a motherboard and hooking up a single SATA hard disk. As Apple isn't exactly focused on the enterprise sector, they probably don't have anywhere near the amount of engineers on it, and these things take longer to come out (They probably share a lot of engineers with the XServe team, which has been really busy lately with Apple's new XServe).
drakinoJan 20, 2007
Oddly, that connector on the drive bay looks like the connectors FC-AL (Fibre channel) disks use. There are FC disks based off SCSI disks and also "FATA" drives that are based off SATA disks. I wonder if Apple is using those drive bays to convert SATA disks to Fibre. Either that, or they just like having a proprietary connector. Most of the SATA units I have seen use just the standard SATA connectors on the backplane, since the location is a standard. Similar to the Mac Pros where you just put the metal cage around a SATA drive and plug it directly into the system.Running Fibre all the way to the disks would be interesting to see Apple do, since it means they are at least trying to keep up with the rest of the storage industry. They have done a decent job so far of keeping up with the standards as far as working with other equipment.