Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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As the Apple Turns
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Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
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Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Tuesday, February 11, 2003
12:29 - That's a whole lotta storage. http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/	(top)
I'd been wondering how the Xserve had been doing since its introduction last year. Apple making rack-mount servers? Fie! Vade retro, Satanas! I'd talked to one of the exhibitors at MacWorld and heard from him that sales were brisk, but it's always been difficult to gauge this sort of thing. 1U servers are supposed to be industrial and unsexy. It's not like you see them on people's desks or on sitcoms. Well, somebody'd better tell Apple, because whether the thing is selling or not, they've committed wholeheartedly to applying the whole "Sex Equals Power" algorithm thing to the server space. They just released the Xserve RAID, and having seen it in action on the show floor, I can't imagine even the most stolid IT guy being able to keep from going all gooey over it. Just watching the stacks of blue LEDs going up and down the middle as disk access rises and falls is a trip. And from a pure technical standpoint, it looks like a real competitor. I treat Apple's bar-graphs with as much skepticism as anybody should who knows it's more for eye-candy purposes than to report actual real-world benchmark results; but I suppose it's pretty hard to argue with storage-space density measurements. Do the math: 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 2.52TB of high-performance redundant storage at just over $4 per gigabyte -- a fraction of the cost of storage from Dell, HP, Sun or EMC. (as compared to pricing on their websites in February, 2003) The days of seemingly unlimited IT budgets are long gone -- no more blank checks 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. I wonder whether they'll be taking heat for committing to ATA over SCSI. I know it raised a bunch of eyebrows when the Xserve first came out with these ATA drive units; I mean, sure, they're cheaper. (Way cheaper. Way way cheaper. Like 1/3 the cost and three times the available storage size. Not 15Krpm, true, though.) But some people do still demand the absolute best in throughput. I suppose that's one of the selling points of Xserve RAID, though: it offloads the disk-access load onto the storage-unit processor, so the server CPU doesn't have to worry about it. Essentially it's all the benefit that SCSI offers anyway; plus the Fibre Channel interface, which the guy at the Expo wouldn't even let me take a picture of because it was apparently brand-new and top-secret. (It'll offer much longer cable lengths than SCSI, for one thing-- it's optical.) I think the speed argument probably won't be much of an issue. In any case, they've got a bunch of pages at the site that seem to flood the reader with reasons why ATA and Fibre Channel should give buyers no reason to pine for SCSI. Their slogan at the top of the site right now is "We Mean Business", and it does indeed look like they're pouring it on here. This can either mean they're seeing an extraordinarily lucrative market for Xserve and Xserve RAID products, and they're striking while the iron is hot; or else they've had these products in the works for years, and they're just giving them the big fanfare of marketing hoo-hah that they'd always planned to, whether it ends up selling or not. We may never know, unless these products mysteriously vanish from the inventory in a couple of years. Optimist that I am, I'm willing to believe that the Xserve has found itself a pretty healthy niche, and is growing in popularity (with a surge due now that Xserve RAID is out), and is helping to reestablish the Apple name in heavy-duty business. They've got a new 1.33 GHz Xserve out now too, and it looks as though they're serious about keeping things in step. So I'll give this effort the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I'll do my part and pressure our IT guys into letting us have one next time we have to replace one of these auto-disintegrating Dell 1550s with their faceplates that don't lock properly and their CD-ROMs that fail and their Ethernet cards that stop working three weeks into service.