Those of you with large installations have probably considered Apple's Select, Preferred, or Alliance Support plans.

As of today, these plans include support for Xsan. This means a separate agreement for Xsan is no longer necessary.

It isn't too common to witness Apple forgoing a revenue opportunity. Optimistically, this is a sign of Xsan's maturity and ubiquity.

There's a forum discussion worth highlighting on tuning Xsan for small files. Thanks to user memblin for posting such a good summary of his experience.

We're hoping for a follow-up announcement real soon now...

If you support geographically disparate Xsans that you don't have remote access to then chances are that you've needed to have someone send you the logs for their Xsan. And if so, then chances are you've stepped them through going into the /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/Data folder and emailing or FTPing the contents to you. Well, no more of that. You can now leave an item on the Desktop or the Dock to automate the process using XsanDebugger, a quick, light and easy app to get the logs compressed onto your desktop.

Simply download the app from http://www.krypted.com/apps and then extract the contents onto the server, or email it to a user as needed. Then, when you need to step them through sending you the logs all they need to do is double-click on the app and provide an administrative username and password (after all only an admin can read the folder). The result will be a file with a name indicated by the user on the desktop. Check it out and if you have any additions or changes then please feel free to leave feedback and those will be addressed!

Let's start with a simple one. Sometimes an Xsan Volume won't mount after an unexpected shutdown.

Background
The Mac OS X operating system (as well as all other unices OS) mounts filesystems in a folder. That mean that every time we plug a USB thumb drive, external hard drive or Xsan volume, it creates a folder in /Volumes using the name of the volume. This folder will serve as a pointer to the actual content of the drive.
If a drive with the same name is already plugged-in (that is, a folder with this name already exists), Mac OS X creates a new folder, appending 1.

What happens
Sometimes, the created folder isn't removed because of an unexpected shutdown. This means that either the Volume doesn't mount (this is usually the case with Xsan), or file paths are different, causing file offline issues.

How to solve this

1. Go to /Volumes (in Finder, Go > Go to folder… or CMD-SHIFT-G)
2. Check the contents of the ghost folder (be careful as some processes might have written some data in it)
3. Delete it
4. Reboot, replug device or remount

I usually do it in command-line, to ensure that I'm deleting an empty folder :

Last login: Mon Jan 25 07:54:49 on ttys000
Bosco$ cd /Volumes/
Bosco$ ls
Macintosh HD  SANVolume 1
Bosco$ rmdir SANVolume 1/
Bosco$ sudo xsanctl mount SANVolume
Bosco$

References

• http://boscovideo.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/xsan-troubleshooting-tips-1-duplicate-entry-in-volumes/ (Original post)
• http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2474

Active Storage has released their long-awaited iPhone app. The app allows you to monitor (not change) the status of their line of RAID systems. Features include:

• Multiple systems can be monitored at once
• Various levels of detail, from at-a-glance summaries to controller utilization to individual drive status

Too bad you can't make the lights blink. The free app is available from the App Store, of course. Be the first to review it!

Quantum has released StorNext 4.0, highlighting the following new features:

• Replication; protecting business critical data off site, as well as furthering data distribution globally for improved workflows
• File System Deduplication; improving storage optimization, significantly reducing costs and management overhead
• High Availability (HA) enhancements; deliver the highest level of availability for increased uptime and business continuity
• Distributed Data Movers (DDM); eliminate I/O bottlenecks by acting as a conduit for passing data to and from storage tiers and archives
• Partial File Retrieval (PFR); streamline workflow in media asset management applications with timecode-based file retrieval

While Xsan shares much of its DNA with StorNext and can be used to make Macs into StorNext clients, many of the existing features in StorNext like the ability to manage tiered storage with Xsan metadata controllers or the Distributed LAN Client (which essentially delivers the SAN via ethernet alone) are absent from and unsupported for Xsan clients. However, the features that are particular to a StorNext metadata controller or Storage Manager environment can often be leveraged in StorNext environments that include Xsan clients. Apple tends to lag Quantum in issuing compatibility guidelines for Xsan and StorNext, so stay tuned and respect your version dependencies.