Apple making waves in storage

Dan,

you say "many people in the video world will tell you it doesn't work well ...".

My experience is just the opposite and based on our research we are preparing to purchase a system.

Can you provide any links to support your statement?

Thanks.

My company has 4, running mission-critical applications, in a Sun Solaris environment.

Yes, they are great value, half the price of anything comparable. An important consideration is that Applecare is really cheap for 3 years of coverage. The cost of the service contract alone on our old NetApps was more than the price of a brand spanking new XServe RAID. One of the hard drives failed on a couple of months ago (no biggie, we configured them with one drive on each side set aside as a hot spare, so we would have to lose two more before the array became unusable). We had the replacement in our hands in less than 4 hours, and you can buy a reasonably priced spares kit if you don't want to wait even that long.

Very true. One time while I was getting a hair cut in the mall, my stylist asked me what I got at the iPod store--she saw my Apple bag. Problem is, it's the Apple store, not the iPod store. I sort of laughed.

Many people in the video world will tell you it doesn't work very well and is problematic. There are cheaper and better alternatives for a RAID
for your FCP setup.

Dan

Apple has 190% more LEDs on their RAID hardware than their competitors.
Also Apple's LEDs are on average 40 ANSI lumens brighter.
Apple has the highest lumens/gigabyte ratio in it's class.
The XServe RAID also packs more Fibre than 8 bowls of Kellogg's Special K.

Some of the same details here as Om Malik a couple days ago. He's got a few other juicy details as well: http://gigaom.com/2006/03/07/in-storage-apple-is-shining/