New Active Storage RAID for Apple

Building on the success of the Active Storage XRAID, Active Storage announced the Active Storage XRAID ES in 4TB and 16TB configurations, with the 16TB configuration offering 67 cents per GB cost. This new, affordable, high-performance storage solution is ideal for business-critical, science, and education use in Apple-based infrastructures, and complements Active’s existing product line with a groundbreaking new entry cost with future upgradeability.

"Active Storage continues to innovate in the storage space with these two new products", says Bob Wilson, President of Solutioneering LLC. "We see the Active Storage XRAID ES 4TB model combined with Solutioneering’s Data:enRoute ILM software as a real breakthrough for smaller businesses wanting to step up to professional grade data management – and a way to finally stop juggling sneaker-net external drives and slow, consumer-grade NAS devices."

The Active Storage XRAID ES was created using the same sound principles that guided the development of the original Active Storage XRAID, providing business users with the most cost-effective storage solution without sacrificing any of the capabilities that made the Active Storage XRAID a success.

The new Active Storage XRAID ES employs the same level of per-port performance, reliability and ease of management (using the industry’s first native Mac OS X storage management suite found in the original Active Storage XRAID), yet offers a lower-cost configuration taking advantage of a single high-throughput RAID controller and business-class hard drives with smaller read/write cache.

The Active Storage XRAID ES was carefully designed for use in business critical applications where organizations require a high level of data integrity, ease of installation and management, but not the 24/7 365 day duty cycles of a large enterprise, post-production or broadcast facility.

"For us, the Active Storage XRAID re-opens exciting possibilities with new potential customers as well as many prospects that liked the old Apple Xserve RAID but were waiting for a new and improved model,” said Richard Bauer, President and CEO of Cloverleaf Communications. “Together we will provide virtualization across heterogeneous SAN & NAS; Enterprise level Data-Protection & Disaster Recovery; Non-disruptive any-to-any Data Migration; Virtually unlimited scalability supporting up to 12PB capacity with up to 255TB per volume, 192,000 snapshots, unlimited number of storage tiers all for a fraction of price of other similar solutions".

Performance of the Active Storage XRAID ES is impressive — offering up to 744MB/s in a RAID 5 configuration. The ES is ideal for non-Xsan based Mac OS X Server Applications and is the ideal storage for business-class applications such as file serving, database services, web hosting, calendar, Wiki, Mail, iChat and much more. The Active Storage XRAID ES is also ideal as an archive storage device for near-line and Disk-to-Disk backup of The Active Storage XRAID or other Enterprise Class storage. Its speed and ease of management make it the perfect choice in a tiered storage environment.

The Active Storage XRAID ES provides redundant power, triple-redundant cooling and redundant Fibre Channel connections and is managed using the same powerful, yet easy to use management tools of the original Active Storage XRAID. The ES differs from the original Active Storage XRAID by utilizing a single high throughput RAID controller and business-class hard drives using a smaller cache size. These changes result in a very cost-effective and robust RAID solution ideal for business-class applications starting at a ground-breaking $6,999 US MSRP.

When combined with the Active Storage XRAID and powerful Archive and ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) solutions from Bone or Solutioneering, IT Administrators can create high capacity, easy to manage and highly secure data archives. These solutions are equally suited for Enterprise-wide Server applications or in Video Post or Broadcast environments.

With the Active Storage XRAID ES there is no longer any need to settle for inadequately engineered, cheap solutions or roll-your-own RAIDs, as the Active Storage XRAID ES is available in a 4TB configuration that is remarkably affordable at $6,999 US MSRP, while still offering best-in-class performance, reliability and ease of management.

The Active Storage XRAID ES is also available in a price leading 16TB configuration providing unmatched value at $9,999 US MSRP.

Either solution is upgradable to provide a higher level of performance and fault tolerance by adding a second RAID controller. This field-installable upgrade will provide increased throughput and true Active/Active redundant operation, and the ability to add expansion systems for increased capacity.

The 4TB solution is upgradeable to higher capacity simply by adding additional drive modules, and is also a field installable upgrade.