Apple Computer Inc. on Tuesday announced that it is shipping its Xsan Storage Area Network (SAN) file system, now available for US$999 per client and per server. Xsan is a 64-bit cluster file system that enables Mac OS X Server users to share files and volumes up to 16 TB (Terabytes) in size on a Fibre Channel network. Apple also announced an upgrade to its rack-mountable Xserve G5 file server, upping the top-end and "Cluster Node" configuration's processor speed to 2.3GHz and its system bus speed to 1.15GHz.
Fibre channel-based SAN systems like Xsan are high-speed networking storage solutions aimed at environments like video and film editing, broadcast, visual effects and motion graphics creation. Xsan's applications extend beyond video and film, as well -- Apple sees a market for Xsan in business, government, education and high performance computing -- all environments that can benefit from storage consolidation where features like metadata controller failover, Fibre Channel multipathing, file-level locking and more sophisticated volume management can be used effectively.
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