XServe Raid no longer available, Apple partners with Promise

The SATA version of the Xraid was demoed to some in Jan 07, but never made it to market. It would not surprise me that the xraid was so slow selling that the ones you might have recently purchased were manufactured a year ago.

I hear the xserve is about to go the way of the xraid. Apple does not make much money with the enterprise hardware. Like many have said, Apple is always too far behind the enterprise curve. I see in the next 6-12 months that Apple partners with a hardware manufacturer to make/sell non-Apple servers enabled to run OSX server. Then bye-bye Xserve. Any thoughts?

The Xserve RAID was initially attractive due to the price four years ago but if you seriously looked at it you realized very quickly that you needed a major investment to actually make it fault tolerant. You had to buy two Xserves, Xsan, and ideally two Xserve RAID chassis (though it was possible to configure a fairly small amount of redundant space with a single chassis) to guard against single point of failure situations with the hardware. So all things being equal you still ended up with a $20K ticket when you had other vendors doing the same level of fault tolerance inside of a single chassis for less money.

I agree with Mike above though; I don't really understand why they couldn't have slapped a brushed aluminum bezel onto the promise and labelled it Xserve RAID 2. The only logical conclusion is that Apple is underestimating the market for this and did not want to pursue another OEM deal - probably because sales of the initial Xserve RAID had sucked so bad. Still it's nice to see them support third party hardware once in a while...

Jeez, no wonder the professional Mac admins out there aren't reading TUAW anymore with commentary like this. Do any of you people have at least the slightest idea about SANs, Xsan, or how it compares to the rest of the market?

Apple released a single minor update to their Xserve RAID in four years; the last model that someone said he'd ordered was still using PATA (IDE/ATA) HDs. They didn't even make the jump to SATA. I'm certain that Apple's R&D group had some next-generation Xserve RAIDs in the works but in the end the bean-counters and management decided that it's better to partner with a 3rd-party to release RAID chassis for use with their Xsan product. The fact of the matter is that Apple's Xserve RAID just wasn't competing well in the SAN market. Rorke's Galaxy chassis were outperforming the Apple Xserve RAIDs, as were, I'm sure, several other vendors.

Apple made the smart move to get out rather than continue to try to sell a product that wasn't performing well. Note that Apple's still focusing on Xsan 2.0 and building kick-ass metadata controllers in the form of Xserves. I'm not criticizing Apple; just pointing out some sound business judgement. With other vendors aggressively targeting this Enterprise storage space (Isilon, Rorke, EMC, HP, Equallogic (Dell), just to name a few), it's no wonder Apple was finding it hard to compete.

But hey, let's all focus on sniping comments about proper grammar instead of discussing the actual issues.

Darn it. Where the heck am I going to get stylish and expensive RAID rack that will be hidden a data center?

I think this is a result of the OEM supplier being acquired, but I'm just guessing :-)

If Apple is going to promote a raid array from another company they could have at least sold them their chassis design so that I don't have to put that ugly thing in my racks of Apple gear. I'm not all about aesthetics, but come on you can't deny Xserve and Xserve Raids looks awesome. Let the run on the pretty stuff begin!!

OOPS. looks like i got a little ahead of myself. The xserve is there but not the raid.... sorry

Well, if you look at the bottom of http://www.apple.com/xsan/resources/
you will still see the XSERVE under the "server" heading..Somebody is getting lazy over in cupertino!!

I don't mind the support for Promise equipment but sheesh man...if Apple can't sell anything other than computers and iPods those lofty 250 bucks a share prognostications sound like pipe dreams. As soon as iPod/iPhone sales are soft Apple's stock tanks. Shudder.

We have some Promise RAID here, and it works well, it's inexpensive, and they are very good to work with if you have questions. We actually looked at XServe RAID in the past but the Promise was faster and cheaper.