Apple Xserve RAID M9721, 1000GB Rack (3U) disk array

XServe RAID 1TB 4x250G, 2x2GB Meet the elegantly engineered companion to Apple’s highly regarded Xserve server hardware. This cutting-edge, self-contained storage solution holds up to 14 hot-swappable Apple Drive Modules — a phenomenal 10.5TB of data — in a rack-optimised storage enclosure.

Xserve RAID features a breakthrough Apple-designed architecture that combines affordable, high-capacity Ultra ATA drive technology with an industry-standard 2Gb Fibre Channel interface for reliable — and incredibly fast — data access. Xserve RAID is hands-down the best value in external RAID storage. Xserve RAID works well with Mac OS X Server, and you can use it with Windows-, Linux- or NetWare-based servers as well.

High yield, low Cost

Do the maths: the gigabyte-per-dollar ratio of Xserve RAID is the best in the world for Fibre Channel storage and trumps most SCSI storage solutions as well. Xserve RAID offers up to 10.5TB of high-performance storage at under $1.31 per gigabyte — a fraction of the cost of storage from Dell, HP, Sun or IBM. The days of seemingly unlimited IT budgets are long gone — no more blank cheques for digital asset management — so as an IT professional, you need to cut costs without cutting corners. For that reason alone, we think you’ll appreciate our pragmatic approach to help you save huge amounts of data — as well as a nice chunk of change.

How Xserve RAID works, in a nutshell

Each 7200-rpm hard drive connects to a dedicated Ultra ATA drive channel to eliminate bottlenecks and maximise the 400MB/s Fibre Channel host connection. This in turn means that as you add drives, Xserve RAID scales in both capacity and performance. And with an industry-standard 42U rack holding 147 terabytes of storage, you can keep adding drives for virtually unlimited storage*.

Failure Is Not an Option

Digital video footage, large databases, media-rich documents, hi-res images, uncompressed audio and scientific data sets have one thing in common: terabyte-sized storage needs. And while trying to keep up with the demand for more and more storage space is a job in itself, you can’t lose sight of the need to protect your digital content against all contingencies — and still make that combination available to users around the clock.

Fast access to your digital assets

Instead of following the ruinously expensive — and easily avoidable — industry practice of relying on Fibre Channel hard drives, Apple did something truly innovative: we designed and developed a high-performance Ultra ATA-to-Fibre Channel systems architecture that delivers superior performance and reliability at a much lower cost.

Xserve RAID is designed for non-stop operation, with uninterrupted access to your critical data. Redundant hot-swappable power supplies and cooling modules enable the system to keep running even if one module were to fail. All active components are modular and designed to be switched in and out of place in seconds — without tools and without interruption of service.

You control the controllers

Each Xserve RAID controller uses an environment management coprocessor to monitor and manage the RAID set and enclosure conditions. Naturally, you control the controllers, instead of the other way around. The RAID Admin utility uses the environment management coprocessor to build multiple RAID sets on the fly, enabling you to bring storage online instantly — with no waiting for initialisation. And since the RAID Admin utility is written entirely in Java, you can monitor and manage your RAID storage from anywhere on the Internet.

Practice management by walking around

On-site management is even easier. The fact is, if you’re the kind of IT professional who likes to keep tabs on what’s going on in your domain by actually walking around and checking things out for yourself, you’ll love the way Xserve RAID provides continuous visual feedback on system status. Indicator lights on the front panel display status at a glance for power cooling, RAID controllers and enclosure lock, while LEDs on each Apple Drive Module signal drive activity. With 46 blue LEDs down the middle displaying activity levels for each host channel and Fibre Channel indicators showing link status, you can verify a system’s health just by looking at it.

Data storage that rocks around the clock

With redundant and hot swappable components — like drives, power supplies and cooling modules — Xserve RAID gives you protection and availability any time, day or night. Xserve RAID is prepared for every contingency.

Doesn’t stop while you swap

Xserve RAID drives feature true hot-swapping capabilities that allow you to remove and replace a failed drive without losing data or interrupting service, thanks to the hardware RAID controller and the Apple-designed drive carrier. With Xserve RAID, the system continues to operate while the contents of the failed drive are rebuilt on a replacement drive, using redundant or parity information.

SMART data

Xserve RAID hardware and remote management software work together to provide industry-leading remote monitoring and alerting capabilities. The RAID controller automatically reads Self-Monitoring, Analysis, Reporting Technology (SMART) data from each hard drive. SMART data lets you take pre-emptive measures. It allows the drive to report its health, and enables the operating system to warn you of a pre-failure condition — and gives you an opportunity to replace the hard drive before a failure occurs. The goal? Uptime, all the time.