So, for the past week, I’ve been configuring a rack of coolness for a customer. Namely, an 11TB SAN built on Apple’s Xsan/Xserve/Xserve RAID products. In a word, sweeeeeet.

What you see to the left is (from the bottom up)

It was touch-and-go at the beginning of the week… I had the servers all gen’ed up with OS X Tiger Server when I realized that the currently released version of Xsan (1.0.1) wasn’t certified for Tiger. Not only wasn’t it certified, it wouldn’t allow you to even attempt an install on Tiger.

This being WWDC week, however, brought the release of 1.1, which in addition to being Tiger certified, supports volumes in excess of 2 TB.

The RAIDs are split into three logical volumes; a metadata volume (two drives, RAID 1), a DATA volume for shared home directories and such (5 drives, RAID 5), and a huge VIDEO volume (3×7 drives, RAID 5 striped).

Talk about performance. When you get everything spun up, it really hums. As a test, I created a 5GB file and moved it around in various ways. Basically, I can move it off the desktop of a client machine onto the SAN in about 85 seconds. Five GIGA (that’s Billion with a G) BYTES in under a minute and a half.

Sure is fun to watch all the little blue lights flicker when the bits are flying.

We de-rack and deliver tomorrow. Hopefully the integration will go smoothly.

wow. Didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. Still think there’s something more to the story that we’re not getting yet. This’ll be interesting.

Sorry, I’m just not buying it.