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Eats shoots and viruses

Posted on 17 Jun 2004 at 11:30

David Moss falls in love with a cute, furry animal, while Jon Honeyball gets his hands on Apple's Xserve RAID

Next up is the interconnect: Xserve is a proper SAN solution, so it connects via Fibre Channel at 2GB/second, which can move data in and out at a quite ridiculous speed. Then there's the doubling-up of I/O interfaces, power supplies, backup batteries and fan arrays: this is heavyweight, high-end engineering at its best. To fully understand the Xserve, you have to realise that you're getting two complete solutions in one box - looking at the front you see two sets of seven disks, and you could almost chainsaw the box down the middle and have it keep working. That's because there are two separate systems inside - two sets of seven disks, each with its own power supply, fan array, interface card and battery backup. Because of this, you can't set up any volume bigger than seven disks - if you want the whole 3.5TB in one lump, you'll need to set up twin seven-disk arrays and then join these volumes together via software on the host computer, which is a solution that few are likely to endorse. What's much more likely is that you'll connect each side of the system to a different server, giving each its own 1.6TB store, which will both be held in the one physical box. Or if you wanted more servers to join in the fun, you could connect both channels to a Fibre Channel switch and then connect all the servers to it. That way you can partition out chunks of disk space to each server, but have it all held in one place.

Naturally, the Xserve supports high-end disk partitioning, such as slicing. For example, if you set up all seven disks as one large partition, you might want to slice off a piece of this space to make another volume. However, you might want this disk space for some very disk-intensive task like a big database, so it would be really helpful if you could slice this space off the outer edges of all the disks, thus maximising the access speed. Xserve allows you to do this. What it can't do - which the really high-end solutions allow - is add disk space and fiddle around while leaving all the data intact.

Administering the RAID is simplicity itself: you justfire up the Java-based application and this allows you to build, rebuild and adjust the arrays, as well as do all the normal management tasks. Because it's a Java application, it runs just fine on a Windows machine that has a grown-up installation of the JVM installed. Apple has recently had the Xserve RAID certified for Windows, so no Apple server is required at all. Just wire up its Fibre Channel connectors to your server and away you go. It really is that simple: I'm getting a couple of Fibre Channel cards to allow direct connection to my Windows 2003 servers, but I'm sure it will work just fine.

Overall then, is Xserve worth the extra over a cheap NAS solution? That depends on what you want and what uses you're going to put the storage to. Personally, I think the price premium is worth it just for the build quality and the ability to host SQL Server, Exchange and so forth on one large disk array. In this latter area, the Windows NAS solutions are still seriously weak. And then there's the wow factor to consider - it might cost £7,500 but it looks a million dollars, with its front panel covered in green and blue LEDs. If you're buying storage for the long term, where you want to get at least five, and preferably eight years, life out of the solution, then Xserve RAID is probably just the ticket. It's powerful enough to make a difference, yet still relatively affordable, and it will be a real wrench to give it back to Apple.