Today organizations struggle to balance reduced IT budgets, ever-expanding demands on storage infrastructure and new regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, that put even more stringent requirements on maintaining corporate data. Something has to give. Enter Apple, with an enterprise-class SAN solution at a fraction of the price of others.
Pool Your Resources
You can simplify your data management tasks and maximize your storage resources without compromising performance and scalability using an Apple SAN. Unlike other SAN solutions, which only consolidate hardware physically, Xsan lets you centralize the data as well and thus eliminate complex storage provisioning. And because Xsan is completely interoperable with Quantums StorNext file system, you can even provide Windows, Linux and other UNIX platforms with direct Fibre Channel block-level access to the data in your Xsan-managed storage pool. Investing in an Apple SAN solution will increase the flexibility of your storage infrastructure, provide better utilization of storage resources and help you lower your IT costs in these budget-conscious times.
Easily Allocate Resources Centrally
Xsan lets you deploy centralized SAN solutions that take advantage of the performance, availability and low price per gigabyte of Apples Xserve RAID storage. As an IT administrator you can use Xsan to consolidate your data, manage it centrally and allocate access to any application or any user anywhere on your network. You can then use Xserve as NAS heads (servers attached to a SAN that provide NAS functionality) to provide scalable, high-performance file services for Mac, Windows and Linux clients on the network.
On-the-Fly Expansion
Since you can connect many servers to many storage devices, you can use your IT infrastructure more flexibly and efficiently than if each server had attached storage that it didnt use fully. In fact, deploying a dedicated storage network with Xsan can make network services faster and more reliable, because one server isnt the single point of access for stored data. Xsan also makes it easy to scale out storage simply add more Xserve RAID systems to increase SAN capacity and performance.
Information Lifecycle Management
Macs with Xsan can take advantage of real-time policy-based data management solutions. You can add a Mac with Xsan to an existing infrastructure that uses Quantums StorNext Storage Manager. Deployed in conjunction with Quantums Scalar line of tape libraries, you can set up pre-defined service levels for different classes of data and automate your data placement and protection objectives.
Xserve RAID Storage Pool. Keep data in one place.
Metadata Controller. Directs servers to files in pool.
NAS Heads. Servers access data over Fibre Channel.
Data Consumers. Access traditional services via http, ftp or file sharing.
Fibre Channel Switch. Gives high-speed access to storage.
Backup Controller. Provides high-availability insurance.
Xsan and Data Centers
Heres why Xsan is the ideal addition to your data infrastructure:
- Data Consolidation. Aggregate storage pools and eliminate the need for storage provisioning.
- File-Level Locking. Allows multiple servers to connect to a single shared volume.
- Metadata Controller Failover. Maximizes availability to ensure SAN operation in the event of a metadata controller failure.
- Flexible Volume Management. Makes it easy to scale SAN volumes by adding storage pools as capacity needs grow.
- User Quotas and Authentication. Works with directory-based management for centralized data security.
In the Classroom
You can also use Xsan to save money by pooling student records, server-based home directories and multimedia projects together.