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Xserve RAID
The Xserve RAID disk array may seem as if
it was intended to be used exclusively with the Apple Xserve
UNIX server, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Of course, it works exceedingly well with the Xserve, but
it works just as well with other server environments including
Windows, Linux or any other.
The Xserve RAID incorporates some very high-tech
and ingenious design features for fast and reliable data access.
The cornerstone of its development is the dual objectives
of fault tolerance and hot swappability, without sacrificing
the dollar cost per gigabyte of storage. It offers up to 5.6
TB of total storage at a little over $2 per GB – which
is very inexpensive by industry standards! Apple achieved
this feat by a very unique design – instead of using
Fiber Channel hard drives, it simply used an Ultra ATA to
Fiber Channel architecture, which allows you to achieve high
performance at a low cost.
 The
very purpose of a RAID device is to provide for redundancy
in every aspect with uninterrupted access to critical data.
The Xserver RAID achieves redundancy in power supply by providing
a battery for backing up the disk cache. It also has a removable
power supply unit. Even if the unit were to lose power this
would ensure that the data is completely written to the disk
and there is no loss of data.
The RAID set management of the Xserve RAID
unit will make the physical location of the data in the RAID
set completely transparent to the server. It will intelligently
be able to distribute the data internally, as it has its own
processor to manage data distribution and data integrity.
When the device is configured in RAID 5, it will provide fault
tolerance. You can then replace a drive with another and the
RAID controller will automatically rebuild the data on the
drive using parity information.
The active components such as drives, power
supplies and cooling modules are hot-swappable, meaning that
you can at any time, during operation of the array remove
and replace the component without shutting down the Xserve
RAID. The Xserve RAID also has remote management software
that works in conjunction with the hardware to provide alerting
and monitoring capabilities. It is termed as SMART, an acronym
for Self Monitoring, Analysis Reporting Technology, which
helps a drive to report its own health and take measures before
a hard drive failure.
All this is in aid of ensuing that your data
is safe and available in real-time, every time!
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