Apple Updates Xserve RAID

Apple today updated its Xserve RAID storage system, a 3U high-availability, rack storage system to deliver a massive 7 terabytes of storage capacity at the industry’s most aggressive price of just $1.86 per GB. Apple also upgraded its Xserve 1U rack optimized server with up to three 500GB drives, achieving a groundbreaking 1.5TB of storage. Prices for Xserve still start at $2,999 and prices for Xserve RAID at $5,999.

“Apple has shipped an impressive 76 petabytes of Xserve RAID storage in the last two years,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We are now offering our users more capacity at an even lower price per gigabyte.”

The unique architecture of Xserve RAID delivers massive storage density and incredible performance. Designed with 14 independent 500GB Ultra ATA drive channels, Xserve RAID provides up to 7TB of storage capacity with pricing as low as $1.86 per GB, while the dual independent RAID controllers with 512 MB cache per controller offer sustained throughput of over 385MBps—high enough to support the most demanding media production environments using protected RAID level 5. Xserve RAID is certified to run in Mac OS X, Windows, NetWare, SUSE and Red Hat Linux environments.

The Xserve 1U rack optimized server can now hold up to three 500GB drives to achieve a groundbreaking 1.5TB of hot-plug storage. With dual 64-bit 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 processors that deliver over 35 gigaflops of processing power per system and the industry’s fastest front side 1U server system bus, running at up to 1.15 GHz with up to 9.2 GBps of bandwidth per processor and Mac OS X Server version 10.4 “Tiger” installed, it is the ideal server for everything from file and print serving to computational clusters.

Xserve RAID connects easily to any Xserve server or Power Mac desktop system using the dual-channel 2GB Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X card sold separately at an industry breakthrough price of $499 and works seamlessly with Xsan, Apple’s 64-bit cluster file system for Mac OS X to deliver a powerful, easy-to-manage, enterprise class SAN solution at a breakthrough low price that enables organizations to consolidate storage resources and provide multiple computers with concurrent file-level read/write access to shared volumes over Fibre Channel.

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