Datasheet

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Technology Overview
Xsan
• Storage consolidation. A consolidated storage repository eliminates the need for
high-speed DAS devices attached to individual workstations. Consolidation also
increases total available storage and reduces hardware costs, while facilitating project
management, access control, and storage security.
• Tremendous capacity. With Xsan and Xserve RAID, you can work with files and
volumes of up to 2PB,
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making it easy to share enormous media files. Each Xserve
RAID system can hold up to 5.6TB of data.
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• Dynamic scalability. A SAN architecture is easy to scale with minimal interruption
in service. Simply plug more Xserve RAID systems into the Fibre Channel network
for more capacity and better storage performance. To expand the number of editing
stations, simply install Xsan on the additional stations and attach them to the SAN.
Xsan in the Data Center
IT departments in every industry are facing constant growth in data storage needs,
as well as more stringent government regulations for maintaining compliant records.
Together these requirements place tremendous demands on storage infrastructures.
By consolidating storage, reducing data duplication, centralizing management, and
increasing the flexibility of existing storage hardware, a SAN solution can reduce an
organization’s storage needs and lower its IT costs.
An Xsan network can increase the flexibility of your storage infrastructure and the
utilization of your storage resources, thanks to these features:
• Consolidated storage resources. An Xsan solution allows IT administrators to consoli-
date data and manage it centrally—increasing storage utilization and simplifying data
management without compromising performance and scalability. You can allocate
storage to any application, anywhere in the organization, thanks to built-in volume
management and mapping tools. What’s more, consolidation results in dramatically
simpler scalability: Just add more Xserve RAID systems for expanded SAN capacity and
increased performance.
• Simultaneous data delivery. An Xsan network is ideal for delivering load-balanced
database services, home directory services, mail services, or web services. All your
servers can share a single large storage repository, eliminating the need to duplicate
data or divide data among multiple servers. Even your failover server doesn’t need its
own duplicate copy of the data: It can use the same files as the primary server.
• Increased uptime. Because one server is no longer the single point of access for
stored data, you can increase the throughput and the reliability of your network
services. An Xsan network makes it easy to take one system offline for updates—or
add systems to meet expanding needs—without interrupting operations. In addition,
Xsan offers high-availability features such as metadata controller failover and Fibre
Channel multipathing.
• Cross-platform integration. Because Xsan is compatible with ADIC’s StorNext File
System, you can provide Windows, Linux, and other UNIX systems with direct Fibre
Channel block-level access to your Xsan volumes. Power Mac and Xserve systems run
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ning Xsan can also join existing infrastructures that use ADIC’s StorNext Management
Suite, a policy-based information lifecycle management (ILM) solution. When ADIC’s
StorNext Management Suite is deployed in conjunction with its Scalar line of tape
libraries, you can set up predefined service levels for different classes of data and
automate your data placement and storage backup policies.
Powerful and affordable IT solutions
Xsan lets you deploy centralized SAN solu-
tions that take advantage of the performance,
availability, and low price per gigabyte of
Apple’s Xserve RAID storage system.
To provide scalable file services for Mac,
Windows, and Linux clients on the network,
you can use Xserve as a “NAS head”—a server
attached to a SAN with NAS functionality.