Apple has worked with leading storage infrastructure vendors to certify Xserve RAID for integration with existing Fibre Channel hardware and data management solutions. What’s more, Xserve RAID is qualified for use in Linux, Windows, NetWare, and mixed-platform environments.
Microsoft
The Apple Xserve RAID has qualified under the Microsoft Designed for Windows Logo Program. Apple ran all of the tests necessary for qualification for the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system, as well as Microsoft 2000 Server and Professional.
QLogic
“The symbol for rigorous testing, interoperability and excellent support is certification with Xserve RAID,” said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. “Customers can expect the recently certified SANbox 5600 stackable Fibre Channel switches and SANbox 9000 core switches to install easily and deliver the highest levels of performance and reliability.”
Oracle
“Oracle is pleased to work with Apple on certifying Xserve RAID for use with Oracle 10g on the Resilient Low-Cost Storage Initiative for Mac OS X and Linux. Xserve RAID offers Oracle users a cost-effective storage solution that’s ideal for Oracle 10g deployments. Apple’s Enhanced JBOD mode provides an extremely easy method to improve throughput and availability using Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Manager),” said Juan Loaiza, vice president of systems technologies at Oracle.
Red Hat
“This is the first time, we are certifying an Apple product on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform,” said Deb Woods, director of product management at Red Hat. “Apple’s high-performance, aggressively priced storage solution is a good fit with the performance and cost advantages inherent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
Novell SUSE Linux
“This is the first time we are certifying an Apple product on Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,” said Chris Cooper, director of developer services at Novell. “This achievement demonstrates the power of Apple Xserve RAID and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to deliver aggressively priced storage solutions on Linux and meet the high performance requirements of enterprise environments.”
Brocade
“We are pleased that the Apple Xserve RAID has successfully completed Fabric Aware testing with Brocade fabric switches in multi-vendor SAN environments,” said Jay Kidd, Brocade vice president of product management. “Storage area networks are being deployed worldwide at a rapid rate as a scalable, high performance networking foundation for storage environments. The Fabric Aware program is an example of our continued commitment to delivering end-to-end interoperability to SAN customers.”
McDATA
“Achieving this certification with Apple allows McDATA to reach even more customers who want sophisticated solutions that work well together,” said Doug Ingraham, vice president of product management, McDATA. “Pairing Apple’s Xserve RAID hardware with McDATA’s Intrepid-series directors and Sphereon-series fabric switches extends the advantages of enterprise-class solutions to any size customer. This means even smaller companies can afford solutions that enable seamless access to their data, with always-there reliability and the highest availability the industry offers.”
LSI Logic
“IT departments are rapidly migrating to 4Gb/s Fibre Channel SANs in order to take advantage of the increased performance, reliability and investment protection offered by the technology,” said Mark Miquelon, director of HBA business unit, Storage Components Group, LSI Logic. “As adoption continues to ramp, end-to-end interoperability is imperative, which is why LSI is pleased to qualify our 4Gb/s HBAs with Mac Pro and Xserve RAID in order to provide Apple customers a proven Fibre Channel solution featuring next generation PCI Express technology for the utmost performance.”
Emulex
“Emulex has worked closely with Apple to fully certify a low cost, high performance Fibre Channel switching solution for Apple’s Xserve RAID SAN storage solution,” said Brian Reed, vice president of business development. ”Emulex’s SAN Storage Switches will provide Apple’s Xserve RAID customers with the seamless interoperability and ease of management that are Apple’s hallmark. We’re pleased to be a part of Apple’s mission to establish new value to performance benchmarks for storage users with their Xserve RAID solution.”
VERITAS
Apple Xserve RAID in conjunction with VERITAS Volume Manager™ provides a highly scalable integrated data management solution for heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs). Together, Apple and VERITAS offer our customers a comprehensive solution for cost-effective data availability and reliability, significantly lowering the overall cost of deploying and managing their SAN.
ATTO
“In an ongoing effort to provide the Enterprise community with fully-interoperable and reliable storage solutions for their mission-critical data, ATTO is pleased to work with Apple in ensuring compatibility between Apple Xserve RAID and ATTO Fibre Channel infrastructure products,” said Timothy Klein, president and CEO of ATTO Technology, Inc.
Novell NetWare
“The certification of Xserve RAID on Novell NetWare is evidence of seamless interoperability,” said Richard Jones, storage and clustering product manager for Novell. “NetWare customers can confidently take advantage of Apple’s leading-edge storage technologies for massive capacity, fast performance and superior data protection while using Novell’s award-winning platform for delivering secure, non-stop access to network and information resources.”
Cisco
“Now that Apple and Cisco have mutually qualified interoperability of the Apple Xserve RAID storage systems with the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches, our customers can take advantage of the innovative features of these solutions to deploy intelligent, scalable and highly available storage infrastructures,” said Craig Griffin, senior director, Cisco storage networking group.
ADIC
“ADIC’s StorNext solutions for policy-based data management is fully interoperable with Apple’s Xserve RAID and Xsan products. This level of interoperability means the data on Xserve RAID can be simultaneously accessed by Macs running Xsan, and Linux, Windows and UNIX clients running StorNext File System,” said Jonathan Otis, senior vice president of corporate development for ADIC. “In addition, ADIC’s Scalar line of tape library products are tested and certified with Xserve RAID, Xsan and StorNext.”
Exabyte
“Exabyte Tape Archive solutions are fully interoperable with Apple’s Xserve RAID and Xsan products. This level of interoperability means the data on your Xserve RAID can be seamlessly archived to a line of tape library products that are tested and certified with Xserve RAID and Xsan,” said Tony Tombrello, National Sales manager for Tandberg Data, formerly Exabyte Corporation.
Apple updates Xserve RAID
The Xserve RAID storage system has been upgraded to deliver a massive 7 terabytes (TB) of storage data at the industry’s most aggressive price. The unique architecture of Xserve RAID delivers massive storage density and incredible performance.
Apple stacking on the storage
A recent article on Smarthouse.com, discusses the growth of Xserve RAIDs in the server market. This rise is attributed, in part, to reliability and versatility. According to one estimate, nearly 40% of all Xserve RAIDS are connected to non-Mac OS servers.
“South Park” turns to Apple
A Macworld profile of J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor for South Park Studios discusses how Xserves help the production team store the massive amounts of data each show requires.
Apple making inroads
Author Jim Dalrymple in Macworld interviews several key analysts for their comments regarding Xserve and Xserve RAID. Recent reports give Apple “high marks for its efforts in the Enterprise storage and server markets.”
Apple beefs up storage capacity
In an article on CRN.com, author Russell Redman covers the recent upgrade of Xserve RAID that houses more storage capacity and “slashes the product’s cost per gigabyte.”
Apple Remote Desktop 3
WebObjects
