Alex Grossman, CEO of Active Storage has tweeted:
“THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN: www.activestorage.com Fun fun fun…”
Active Storage’s current lineup of products include:
• ACTIVERAID ES: The new standard in affordable RAID storage for Apple professionals
• ACTIVE VIEWER: Exclusive Apple iPhone app for mobile, remote monitoring
• INNERPOOL: Metadata appliance designed specifically for Apple Xsan environments; Active Storage native Apple Mac OS X management suite
• ACTIVE ADMIN: Industry-leading. Native Apple Mac OS X Management Software
Note the common theme: Apple.
Active Storage’s website currently teases:
When Apple announced the January 31, 2011 discontinuation of Xserve back on November 5, 2010, Grossman tweeted that very day, “Xserve EOL – RIP – but when one door closes another opens… “
On November 5, 2010, Grossman also posted an interesting open letter on the Active Storage website. Sleuths and between-the-lines readers, have at it here: Letter from Alex Grossman, Founder and CEO of Active Storage: On news that Apple Xserve is only available to order through January 31, 2011
Curiously, on the day of Apple’s Xserve discontinuation notice, Grossman seemed to have been extraordinarily well-prepared for the news, didn’t he?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jared I.” for the heads up.]
more like dedicated Metadata controller hardware… wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on full OSX server support…
but maybe it will be a full server… probably at twice the cost…
So they have the product to replace the Xsan. Is Apple going to license Mac OS X Server so people have a replacement path for the Xserve?
If it’s just a storage solution and won’t run OS X Server, is it really a proper replacement? We’ll be watching to see just what’s unveiled.
That Jared I. also appears to be well informed, does he hang out at Subway delis?
it is a big ass case in to which you sit your Mac mini ‘server’ and an array of USB 1.1 hard drives.
Apple’s enterprise solution.
Their website has been MDN’d. Slow loading.
dual power supply chassis for rack mounting mini servers?
These guys have a lot of ex apple engineers on the team. If any knows how to reconfigure a box to fit In rack it’s ActiveStorage. It’ll be a server for sure, probably with fibre channel, FireWire 800, lightpeak and USB3 support.
Is it just me, or does “ActiveStorage” sound like a Microsoft thing? (Probably the similarity to “ActiveSync”…)
I don’t see Apple licensing their consumer OS to any other computer maker any time soon but I can see them licensing their server OS. They make money from their consumer hardware. They weren’t making enough money from their server hardware, hence why it was discontinued. They don’t have any money to lose on a product they don’t sell.
I think it would be great if some company well versed in servers and how to sell them to enterprise was to start selling Mac OS X servers. Apple was never very good at selling to enterprise. At least this way they’d still be selling copies of OS X server (though the price on the server software might go up a tad).
Several years ago there use to be a talk about using RAIC, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers, as server. As “nothing to see” says, it could be a tray with spaces for mac minis or USB hard drive or UPS. I think 1U tray can hold up to six mac mini sized blocks, so one can mix and match CPUs, USB drives and UPS. With right OS, the setup can be much nicer than an 1U server.
Does anyone know what type of servers Apple is using at their Maiden, N.C. data center? It’s unlikely they’re using Mac Minis, right? Maybe they’re using the last of the XServes. It would be amusing if they were using HP servers.
Why not use Mac minis? If you have redundant macs, then failure of few servers in a cluster won’t affect the performance. RAID and SAN technologies made use of unreliable low cost hard drives acceptable for server application. Same can be done with computers. More important parameter is power consumption. Given performance requirements, which computer cluster has MembersAlliance CU 4747 Harrisonlowest power usage? Electric bill is one reason to reduce the power consumption, but the cooling requirement for the cluster is bigger problem. Right now, I think Mac minis win.
Not sure how the extra text got in.
“which computer cluster has lowest power usage? “