Apple quietly announced Xsan 2.2 yesterday. Although not yet shipping, we do have some information to bring you.

First, the bad news. Xsan 2.2 is Intel-only. It will not run on PowerPC hardware. This implies that your metadata controllers need to be Intel.

Also, support for 1.x clients has been dropped when connecting to a metadata controller running 2.2. Time to shell out the upgrade money! To be clear, clients can be either PPC (running 2.1.1) or Intel (running 2.1.1 or — better — 2.2).

Now the good news: Xsan 2.2 supports Mac OS X 10.5.7 10.5.8 and 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Snow Leopard will begin shipping on Friday, August 28. There are fixes for extended file system attributes, Spotlight searching, and failover. And it will be a free upgrade from Xsan 2.

Now a friendly reminder: Keep your upgrades under control. No Xsan client should have a greater version of the OS or Xsan than the MDCs. You may want to restrict the ability for your clients to perform software updates until you have updated your MDCs.

Expect Xsan 2.2 to be released shortly. Keep looking here for the latest info.