SATA-based Xserve RAID coming

Ruh roh, Stevie J isn't gonna like this. Looks like AppleInsider landed some rare and much coveted pre-release Apple product pics; no, it's not of the iPhone sans phone or ultraportable MacBook Pro, it's of the long overdue Xserve upgrade to the Xserve RAID, which finally puts cheap and plentiful enterprise SATA drives in the enterprise enclosure. Other improvements AI claims Apple have made to the above "Q57" prototype include an additional four fibre-channel ports, although the fibre-channel controller has apparently yet to be made redundant. We're sure there are more than a few enterprise Mac users hoping they won't have to wait until WWDC 2007 to check this thing out, but we don't have any timeline for release, so we'll all be keeping an eye out for release.

[zverg @ Jan 20th 2007 2:03PM]

you sure they're going to do SATA (which isn't really supported as enterprise level at all yet) and not SAS?

[Ben @ Jan 20th 2007 2:15PM]

I wouldn't be surprised if they are going to use the new 750GB drives for up to 10.5 TB of storage.

[Jesse S @ Jan 20th 2007 3:02PM]

And who in their right mind uses anything over linux for a server OS?

[xtremetechie @ Jan 20th 2007 3:26PM]

And who in their right mind uses anything over linux for a server OS?

Choice, thats what its all about, some things linux does better than everyone, some things Windows does better than everyone else, and some things Mac OS X does better than everyone else. Be careful limiting yourself to one plattform, you may miss out on some pretty sweet stuff.

[Maddope @ Jan 20th 2007 3:25PM]

well...people not only use these for server stuff. My company does its daily uncompressed HD capturing on Xraids. For us, SATA will be just fine, just like OSX is.

[Andr�s @ Jan 20th 2007 6:08PM]

"And who in their right mind uses anything over linux for a server OS?"

Xserve RAID isn't 's not a server, but a storage array, and can work and be managed with practically any OS. It's also certified to work with Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

[JerkyChew @ Jan 20th 2007 5:02PM]

Yeah, the OS doesn't matter = We have a few TB at work of Xserve arrays, and you can hook them to any OS. We have the arrays diced up with some storage going to our Windows servers and others going to our Solaris boxes. They were far cheaper than anything from HP or EMC when we bought them, too.

[Karl Viklund @ Jan 21st 2007 2:08AM]

Man... I need one of those in my house to meet my ever growing need for more storage! :)

[brandonius calculitus @ Jan 21st 2007 2:08PM]

Suckers! Apple is taking there game of "fake the public" to a new level. I can believe that anyone stil believes we can forecast what they are going to do.

[Ryan @ Jan 22nd 2007 7:51PM]

"you sure they're going to do SATA (which isn't really supported as enterprise level at all yet) and not SAS?"

Nah, SAN vendors have started using SATA once NCQ started appearing on drives. In know XioTech has shelfs with SATA for a fact.

[Joe @ Jan 23rd 2007 9:38AM]

Xserve RAIDs have been shipping with SATA for at least a couple years now...