X Serve Raid No Longer?

While trying to find info on the XRaid, I noticed that you are now directed to another company, PROMISE, and their Raid storage systems. Anybody have other info on this? Thanks, Bruce

The thing about Xsan and XRaid is that they were never Apple products. Xsan was licensed from ADIC and was formally known as Centravision Shared File System and I don't know who built the controller for XRaid but it's basically just a JBOD enclosure. You have to give Apple credit for significantly reducing the costs of this level of equipment.

However, and I know that people on this forum are tired of hearing this but this is more of the trend of Apple moving away from professional applications in favor of consumer hardware. Now when you log into the Apple store on-line you have to dig to find the Apple Cinema Displays, they used to be front and center. And I don't have any idea of what happened to FCPServer.

I'm not actually hijacking your thread, if your interested in mass storage and shared file systems there are some really good cost effective solutions available other than Xsan and XRaid anyway. You might want to check out Facilis, expensive but rock solid or CommandSoft's FibreJet. These are volume level shared file system that work very well in an editorial workflow. If you require file level sharing you can contact ADIC directly and ask about Centravision.

It would be great if others would share any experiences they have with this type storage from any manufacturer...

I can also recommend Metasan, which is a file level san, but actually easy to use :-) I should be testing it on Leopard soon. I think Apple should have licenced Metasan rather than StorNext as Metasan is such more a mac-like product :-)

Sad to see the end of the Xraid. When it first came out it was not expensive for the build quality and level of storage it offered. Such a shame Apple never kept pace.

Graeme

Xsan 2 was announced today. Xserve Raid is just a heavy box of drives and others do it much better.

And Chuck, lets stop the rumor about "Apple moving away from professional applications in favor of consumer hardware." It is 100% utter crap. Zero truth to it. None! Pro-Apps are here to stay and are not being shopped around nor have been shopped around nor going to be shopped around.

Michael Horton
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Thanx for that, Mike...SQUASH the rumors. I hate rumors

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.