QLogic Corp., the leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, today announced that QLogic SANblade Fibre Channel HBAs, SANbox switches, and SANsurfer software now support Mac OS X and the Xsan file system. Now for the first time, administrators with Xserve G5 servers and Xserve RAID systems can deploy a single SAN infrastructure to provision their storage to rack, tower or blade servers running a variety of popular operating systems including Mac OS, Windows, NetWare, Linux and Solaris. And for the large base of customers standardized on QLogic HBAs, Apple servers now can be seamlessly integrated to their SANs using the corporate standard HBA.
“I really needed the price/performance of Apple Xserve RAID for my G5 servers,” said Ramy Katrib, CEO of DigitalFilm Tree in the press release. “With support for multiple operating systems, and the diverse post environment we manage, QLogic is helping me extend that price/performance to my Linux and Windows servers.”
SANblade HBAs are now available for servers running Mac OS X. The most popular QLogic HBAs have a field-proven mean-time-between-failure of 1.7 million hours – 100 percent greater than the primary competitor. Reliable SANblade HBAs are backed by a warranty of up to five years — the best in the industry. That’s why according to Dell’Oro, Gartner and IDC, QLogic ranked number one in market share for Fibre Channel HBA ports shipped and Fibre Channel HBA revenue in 2004.
SANsurfer HBA device drivers, HBA management software and switch management software are now available for Mac OS X. QLogic SANsurfer software has the unique capability to manage HBAs, switches and disk arrays from a single console.
The complete line of SANbox Fibre Channel switches is now available for Mac OS X. Recent winner of Storage Magazine Product of the Year, the SANbox 5200 is the market share leader for Fibre Channel stackable switches. And according to IDC, QLogic was the market share leader for Fibre Channel blade server switches in 2004.
QLogic is the leading supplier of Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), Fibre Channel blade server switches, Fibre Channel stackable switches, tape controllers and hard disk controllers. The Company is also a leading supplier of iSCSI HBAs. QLogic products are delivered to small, medium and large enterprises around the world, powering solutions from leading companies like Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Network Appliance, Quantum, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems. QLogic is a member of the S&P 500 Index and NASDAQ 100 Index. For more information, visit http://www.qlogic.com
OK – bullshit patrol…
A mean time between failure of 1.7 million hours is over 190 years. Since the hardware hasn’t been around for that long, how can they make such a claim?
Yeah, I know, lots of bits of hardware out there, cumulative usage, that kind of jazz, but it’s still BS.
I hate marketeers.
Does a widgit exist that will translate from geek into english?
Sounds like it might be good for Apple in The Enterprise market.
1.7 million hours of a MTBF does not mean nothing fails for that long.
If you have a few hundred of these in a very large setup expect something to fail in the next few years.
Going through the math, if you have 100 of these there is a greater than 92% chance that at least one will fail within the next five years.
Saying it another way, if you have 1,000 of these there is less than a 0.6% chance that none of them will fail within the next year.
That is still a very good (low) failure rate.
And as for support for all their HBA .. as far as I know they only have OS X drivers for the QLA23xx series… so if your company is using qla22xx or the “old” qla21xx you still can’t use them on OS X.
HBA = Host Bus Adapter – Think SCSI card, only optical based instead of Copper based (generally speaking, we are talking Fibre Channel)
Fibre channel is just fancy Optical SCSI type interconnects.
It is nice to see thee software OS X native, I wonder how much of it Apple coded for them.
This should help Apple as it tries to grow it’s SAN platform and get into Enterprise data centers
Sure, why not? After all, the Engineering Officer of the Enterprise used a Mac to fabricate transparent aluminum in the fourth movie, so it’s only right that the Enterprise gives something back to Apple…
[Sorry, I coudn’t resist!]
Scotty must of thought he was using a future version of the Mighty Mouse when he tried speaking commands into it.
xan, I agree with your scepticism of MTBF claims. Hard drive companies claim between 100,000 hours and 1 million hours MTBF, but my experience indicates less than 10,000. Just marketing BS.