Apple takes its RAID to new heights
Apple, a relative newcomer to the storage market, has launched a 7 Terabyte RAID system with a price of only £1.14/GB. The company also extended its rack server to hold up to 1.5TB.
"We are now offering our users more capacity at an even lower price per gigabyte.," said Philip Schiller, Apple's marketing vice-president, revealing that the company has shipped 76PB of storage space since it began its onslaught on the market two years ago.
The Xserve RAID shared storage system has 14 independent 500GB Ultra ATA drive channels, and has throughput of 385Mbps through dual independent RAID controllers, each with 512MB cache. It works with Mac OS X, Windows, NetWare, SuSE and Red Hat Linux.
The 1U Xserve server can process at speeds of up to 35 Gigaflops, with its two 64-bit 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 processors. The RAID systems have dual 2Gbps Fibre Channel ports, and connect to servers through a £312 Fibre Channel PCI-X card.
The devices use Hitachi-made drives, which Apple certifies and packages in Apple modules. Prices for Xserve start at £1,871.49 and prices for Xserve RAID at £3,701.38, with the 7TB version costing £7,999.15.
All prices in this report are exclusive of VAT.