Apple Boosts Xserve Speed, Unveils RAID Storage
Apple announced Monday a new Xserve RAID storage system, and increased the speed of its Xserve rack-mount servers to 1.33Ghz.
Xserve RAID features up to 14 hot-swappable ATA/100 drives totaling 2.5 terabytes of storage. Each drive is placed on its own ATA controller to eliminate bottlenecks. The hardware RAID controller supports RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, 3, and 5. The unit can be connected to an Xserve or Power Mac G4 with the 2GB Apple Fibre Channel PCI Card.
"Xserve RAID is an industry breakthrough product, offering up to 2.5TB of high-performance redundant storage at just over $4 per gigabyte?a fraction of the cost of storage from Dell, HP, Sun or EMC," said Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Philip Schiller.
Pricing for Xserve RAID starts at $5,999 USD for dual independent RAID controllers each with 128MB cache and four 180GB 7200rpm drives with 8MB of cache. Models can also be custom-configured by increasing the number of drives and the cache size. Xserve RAID will be available starting in March.
The updated Xserve systems now include 1.33GHz processors along with two FireWire 800 ports, and are priced $200 less than the previous models. Both systems come with an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server and a CD-ROM drive.
The single-processor system with 256MB of DDR RAM, 60GB hard drive and Gigabit Ethernet costs $2,799 USD, while the dual-processor model with 512MB of DDR RAM runs $3,799 USD. Both models will be available in March.