External Raid Storage Options for new Xserve now that Xraid is gone...

[dub]

I was wondering if anyone is using anything besides and older Xraid (2gb fibre channel) or the new Promise V-trak (4gb fibre channel) for storage hooked up to their Xserve.

I just got a new 8-core Xserve with the internal Raid card and after mirroring 2 1-TB drives in bays 2 and 3 we are quickly using up the total 1TB of disk space available. While I knew this wasn't going to be a long term solution I was just buying time until we had to shell out the big bucks for the external Raid.

I would like to go fibre channel and utilize the new 4gb Apple 4 channel fibre channel card so does anyone know of a good external fibre channel raid that would offer around 6 TB of storage and be 4gb fibre channel compatible?

thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Dub

[jcampbell76]

I use a Promise VTrak via Ultra-320 SCSI -- the predecessor to the current FC models. Do not buy the raid from Apple, you can get them direct from CDW along with your own selection of hard drives to populate it. It really is the best and most robust solution for a full-featured RAID.

[neotrog]

Hey;

I looked into the StorVault solution you can buy through Zones. Unfortuantely the budget tanked so I couldn't actually buy it but it seems to have everything you'd want. My understanding is that Apple's new software sees NAS arrays as logical disks which opens a world of possibilities.

[JohnHemsley]

Does anyone know why Apple killed the XRaid?

[neotrog]

If I had to guess out loud;

Limited sales and high support load. Apple really is centered on the consumer market in a big way. If you can make $2,000,000,000+ on disposable iPods, why would you even take the call from a freaked out sysadmin who's entire company is down because your hardware flopped. That and an inability to differentiate products to get a premium price. The array is, after all, just a wad of large disks on a backplane with a fiber-channel controller. It's the OS that is your experience with the array so what Apple has done is logical enough. They focus on the tool (software) used to interface large attached storage and let someone else try to squeeze a profit from the hardware sales.