Apple Beefs Up Xserve RAID Storage Capacity

The 3U rack storage system now can hold up to 7 Tbytes of storage, or 14 500-Gbyte Apple Drive Modules, yet retains its $5,999 starting price. As a result, the upgrade prunes the product&s cost per gigabyte to as low as $1.86, compared with $2.32 previously, said Alex Grossman, senior director of hardware, servers and storage at Apple, Cupertino, Calif.

“Ultimately, what [Apple] ended up doing on the RAID was giving you more storage for the same price,” said David Salav, president of Webistix, a Holbrook, N.Y.-based solution provider. Customers with the prior Xserve RAID model, which holds up to 5.6 Tbytes of storage, can boost its capacity via a firmware upgrade, he said.

At less than $2 per gigabyte of storage, the enhanced Xserve RAID beats the cost of comparable storage from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, Apple said on its Web site. The system comes in 1-Tbyte ($5,999), 3.5-Tbyte ($8,499) and 7-Tbyte ($12,999) models and can run in Mac OS X, Windows, NetWare, Suse and Red Hat Linux environments.

Also last week, Apple bolstered the storage of its Xserve server, which now can hold up to three 500-Gbyte drives. The 1U rack-mount server, which keeps its $2,999 starting price, previously held up to three 400-Gbyte drives.

Apple is targeting its Xserve RAID, Xserve and Xsan SAN systems at markets such as publishing, professional video, SMB, education and high-performance computing, Grossman said.

“We have a large VAR network for Xserve and Xserve RAID,” he said. “We help support VARs with service programs all the way from service parts kits that they can buy and self-service their customers to AppleCare service programs that they can resell.”

Apple also offers a Gold Medallion reseller program in which VARs can go through Storage Networking Industry Association certification and become experts in deploying the Xsan, he added.