I’m off to the mothership in March. Yes, Apple HQ in Cupertino California. This year, Saint Patrick’s Day will be spent with a pint of guinness and a fiber channel switch. Sounds hot, doesn’t it? Well, it is for a nerd I guess.
So what’s XSAN? It’s a like a file-server on speed. Sort of. It’s a software program that’s loaded onto a server and the OSX Clients and it lets the clients use the harddisks attached to the server as though those harddisks were locally connected to the OSX Client. More so, it allows multiple people to use the same remote harddisks as though they were connected to the same machine.
Consider this scenario: I have a 10TB XRAID. I want my office’s four Mac Pros to be able to access it as though each Mac Pro had a 10TB RAID locally connected. Furthermore, I want one Mac Pro to capture media and save it to that RAID, while at the same time I want another Mac Pro to begin editing it and I want Final Cut Server to have access to it for the purposes of cataloging it and putting H.264 encoded versions on the website. All that can be done easily using XSAN2. XSAN2 takes the basic elements (the RAID, the Mac Pros) and joins them into a collaborative network-based file system.
Another example of where XSAN is used involves having multiple servers accessing a common data location. We might want to have two email servers (running Mac OS X Server) and they both will write their email to the same location. In the unlikely event of an emergency landing over water, a hardware failure with one of the servers, the other server can continue handling mail without an email service disruption.
We have some clients locally in Atlantic Canada and Quebec that are using XSAN1. The training course for XSAN2 just recently became available, so I’m going to get trained by Apple on how to teach the XSAN2 course while at the same time furthering my knowledge of how it works, what “gotchas” there are with it and the nuances of it. Then when I return, Splice will be in a better situation to support and advise our customers on XSAN.
Learn more about XSAN on Apple’s website. My course is scheduled for the 17th to the 20th.
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