Products: Apple
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
SAN for Apple Final Cut Studio
After nearly four years on the market, Apple Xserve RAID is no more. This past February, Apple announced it would be discontinuing its SAN product — which was starting to trail the market because it still employed older technologies such as parallel ATA drives (other manufacturers had moved to SATA) and relied on RAID 5 (which can survive one drive failure, but many other vendors were offering RAID 6 — which can handle the failure of up to two drives).
At the same time, Apple announced Xsan 2 software — an upgrade that simplifies SAN management. The company also partnered with RAID storage manufacturer Promise Technology, which has won a key place on Apple's website. At Macworld, Promise announced that its VTrak E-Class RAID subsystems have been qualified with Xsan 2 — which orchestrates Mac OS X and Final Cut Studio. A Promise RAID subsystem delivers 26 streams of 8-bit uncompressed SD video, and it supports capacities up to 24TB per configuration — at a claimed price point of $1.12 per gigabyte. www.promise.com
