Om comments on Apple’s storage sales of the Xserve RAID unit. Although sales of the unit seem to be do well, especially considering that this was a market that Apple has zero presence in only a few years ago, many analysts are frowning on Apple for not doing enough to promote these.
We’ve got a couple of Xserve RAID units at work (one with an Xserve G5, the other plugged in to two Dell 2850s) and I’m definitely a fan. Right now you can order up an Xserve RAID with all of the options for under $18,000. This is simply amazing for 7TB in a RAID box. Sure you could go buy 14 500GB drives from NewEgg for less than $5,000, but what would you put them :-)
I think Apple is still trying to figure out how to market their server and storage products. I guess the folks like me who see these things and start to drool aren’t as common as the folks itching to buy the consumer level product. More than once I’ve gone into an Apple store and told them they need to be showing off their server and storage products, not just the home systems. My requests obviously haven’t had any impact.
I’ve been looking at a couple of different possibilities for expanding our file storage capacity at work, specifically I wanted to see if I’d run into any problems using FreeBSD 5.x with an Apple Xserve RAID using the Apple Fibre Channel card. So back on Thursday (17 Mar 2005) I took the spare Fibre Channel card and put it in a test box and broke the mirror on our current Xserve RAID system (connected to an Xserve G5) and plugged it in a tried it out. The good news is that everything seems to work just fine. FreeBSD detected the card using the mpt(4) driver and found the RAID array without any problems.
The Apple Xserve G5 was up and live the whole time, so it started beeping and sending out notifications when we unplugged one portion of the mirror that I used to test FreeBSD with. So after I started running my tests I walked over to server room again to push the system indicator light/button on the front of the Xserve G5 (just to the left of the USB port on the front panel). So I walk in the room, hold the button down for about a second and all of the sudden the lights in the room turned off and all of the UPSs started beeping madly. After about of second of the power being off the building generator kicked on and we had emergency power running (nice to know the generator works), so all of the UPSs went silent again.
I freaked! I thought maybe I had some how killed a circuit by pushing this button on the Xserve G5. I walked out of the server room and discovered that the whole building was out. A minute later we discovered that the whole campus and surrounding area lost power, so it wasn’t anything that I did. I’m not sure if someone took out a power pole or what, but the power came back on after twenty minutes or so. Just to make sure I went back and pressed the system indicator light/button to see if the power would stay on. Fortunately nothing happened, so it was just coincidence that I happened to have pushed that button at the some moment that good sized power outage happened.
Of course it doesn’t make any sense that pressing that button would cause a power outage, but I was sure spooked there for a minute. Don’t mess with my Xserve G5 or I’ll turn the power off again :-)
