Apple quietly burrows into the enterprise with Xserve, Xsan, Mac OS X

“Apple is quietly burrowing into the enterprise, buoyed by the Unix base of its still relatively new operating system,” Garry Barker writes for the Sydney Morning Herald. “Nobody suggests Apple is likely to supplant the giants of corporate computing. Consumers are still Apple’s chief interest, but that is an area where giants such as Sony and Panasonic offer intense competition. So, for Apple, a belt to help the braces could be useful.”

Barker writes, “Apple has always been strong in scientific, medical and academic applications, but its entry to the bigger end of town gained new pace with the release of the Xserve, a rack-mounted computer. Joining it is a software package called Xsan, a 64-bit storage networking product.”

“A demonstration at Emperor’s Mind in South Yarra showed Xsan controlling more than 11 terabytes of storage and allowing multiple computers to concurrently access all of that storage over a high-speed fibre channel. New storage is added on the fly, seamlessly and without data loss. ‘The amazing thing is when people see an icon on their desktops and realise that the label on that icon is saying something like ‘Available: 10.9TB’,’ says Jason Castan, CEO of Emperor’s Mind, a reseller of professional graphics systems,” Barker writes.

“Mr Castan says Xsan’s appeal is in two broad areas: ‘One is video, a very general area. People there want huge storage, available (simultaneously) to a number of workstations – say, a high-definition workstation, an ingest workstation and cutting on a third – and they can all work on the same media at the same time.’ Corporate users generally don’t need to handle massive video files but, says Mr Castan, have shown interest in Xsan’s live expansion capabilities and in the simultaneous access it allows to their enormous files,” Barker writes.

Full article here.

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