News

posted on 19 February 2008 21:19

Apple has dumped its own-brand Xserve RAID arrays and will now sell 3rd-party Promise VTrak RAID instead.

The Xserve products had built up quite a good reputation but Apple neglected them. They didn't support Serial ATA (SATA) drives and Fibre Channel performance hadn't been updated either.

The Promise E-class RAID has four ports with 4GBit/s Fibre Channel support, dual active:active controllers offering RAID 5 and performance such as 1.4GB/sec of sequential read performance and 617MB/sec of sequential write performance. They accept both SATA and serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives. Apple's Xsan 2 clustered file system works with them.

(Pictured above is a NASA Xserve system.)

Buy them through Apple resellers and the Apple Store starting at $11,999.95.

A supposition is that secretive Apple, used to enjoyably tweaking consumers' chains, doesn't know how to deal with enterprise buyers who don't enjoyed being teased and befuddled. There is a question about how long Apple, focussing more and more on personal and consumer intelligent electronic devices, can continue to be considered a serious server player in its markets.