XServe RAID Makes Strides in the Enterprise

The publisher of titles like "The Incredibles," "Shrek," "Sin City," "Star Wars," and "Aliens" uses BakBone Netvault for Mac OS X, and the self-contained server hardware, XServe RAID.

With this setup Dark Horse has been able to cut back-up and recovery time to obtain digital images of its comics, reducing its administrative overhead by more than 50 percent, according to Chris Irvine, director of IT for the company, who spoke at a recent Apple developers conference.

Market Momentum

"With Apple's continued momentum in the enterprise, high-end data-intensive users are demanding storage backup solutions that help data centers address the challenges of data protection," he said.

RAID, for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, refers to a variety of disk drives that use two or more drives in combination with one another for improved performance and fault tolerance. Apple's variety promises a number of benefits for clients, including:

• Greater throughput and performance than many network engineers can manage with Windows environments;
• A quoted price of US$2/GB of storage, lowering the total cost of ownership;
• A Power P5 chip which enhances performance.

These factors are enabling Apple to target vertical markets, including the government, and, experts say, it may even begin to displace mainstays like Unix and Windows.

Academia Latches On

Researchers in academia -- a traditional playing field for Apple -- are utilizing the XServe RAID technology too, according to Joe St. Sauver, director of user services and network applications at the University of Oregon Computing Center.

"Our LOCI [logistical networking] node is an example of that sort of thing," said St. Sauver.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the LOCI node helps users upload and download large files of scientific data. These are files that are too big to be sent by conventional e-mail, or to download via the Web, multi-terabyte files. This may include experimental data sets from physics experiments, or even multi-hundred megabyte PowerPoint presentations, for scientific conferences.

Without the XServe RAID servers, even with the NSF logistical networking node, speeds of data transfer and throughput are not very good, due to bandwidth delays. The RAID servers distribute the data around the network -- making further distribution much easier.

In late May, Apple shipped an XServe RAID Driver 1.0, new software for users of Final Cut Pro -- mostly digital video producers. The product is said to reduce even further the latency that producers encounter over networks with video by writing the buffer cache to the hard drive.

Fiber Channel Interface

RAID servers use Apple-designed architecture with a standard 2-GB fiber channel interface. The server companion can work with a Mac OS X server as well as with Windows, Linux or NetWare-based servers.

How does the technology work? Simply put, each 7200 RPM hard drive on the RAID connects to a dedicated Ultra ATA drive channel to eliminate bottlenecks and utilize the 400 MB fiber channel host connection. A number of media can be stored, including digital video, media rich documents, uncompressed audio, and scientific data sets.

The technology keeps the throughput constant because it was designed with redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and cooling modules, empowering the system to continue to run, even if one module fails. Components are modular in design, so they can be removed, and replaced, in a few seconds, according to Apple.

What's more, each XServe RAID controller includes an environmental management co-processor to manage the RAID sets. The technology has features, like remote monitoring capabilities.

This is enabling Apple to insert itself today at the lower-mid ends of the enterprise and displace traditional OS's, like Unix and Windows, according to a spokeswoman for BakBone, a data protection solutions provider, which has worked with Apple, and is releasing a new NetVault product for the Mac in the coming weeks.