Site sponsor (and my employer) Tekserve is having Post-NAB wrapups on April 21, 26 and 27. These are free seminars with vendor representatives and products on-hand. Space is limited; click on the links below to register.

• Thursday, April 21 at 1 PM and 5 PM with Isilon Systems
• Tuesday, April 26th at 1 PM and 5 PM with Avid
• Wednesday, April 27th at 1 PM and 5 PM with Building4Media and Active Storage

NAB 2011 is now over and here's my short review. The National Association of Broadcasters puts on a big show with a thousands of vendors. Held at the Las Vegas convention centre it is a lot of really big buildings with an insane amount of booths and an ton of people everywhere. It's a conference geared towards broadcasters and the people that support them. NAB 2011 had a lot of things that are of particular interest for Xsan system administrators, integrators, and consultants.

I only spent one day at the NAB show, and I'll be honest, I did not see close to everything! Here's a short of list of highlights, but feel free to add comments with anything else you saw that seemed interesting.

Read on for more about ActiveSAN, Promise, Thunderbolt, Peripherals, Apple FCP X, and Backup Software....

At NAB yesterday, Promise Technology announced the SANLink Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel adapter. From the press release:

"SANLink will provide a dual 4G Fibre Channel link that can be used to connect to external Fibre Channel storage or to an Xsan network. Each adapter features full duplex FC ports that automatically detect connection speed and can operate independently at 1, 2 or 4Gb/s. SANLink is the perfect companion to connect to the new VTrak x30 Series as well as maintain compatibility with the previous generation VTrak x10 Series."

Bringing Xsan to laptops is great, but what about having Mac Mini Servers to interface to Xsan Volumes?

In advance of NAB, Active Storage today announced ActiveSAN configurations and pricing.

I'll post more details here soon, once I get my kid off to school!

Update: Active has confirmed that the listed prices are for a PAIR of units. That's a much easier pill to swallow!

Apple tonight released Mac OS X Server 10.6.7 and Mac OS X 10.6.7. Among the fixes:

• Xsan: Fixes an erroneous prompt for administrator access when copying a file in the Finder to an Xsan volume.
• RAID card: Includes the ability to repair certain issues that may prevent hardware RAID volumes from mounting. For more information, see this article.
• File services: Improves reliability of the AFP Service.
• File services: Fixes an issue that could generate unnecessary files inside an "HFS+ Private Data" directory on an AFP or SMB server.

Apple posted new info about the next version of Mac OS X today, and with it the first official mention that there will indeed be a Server version of Lion. When the Xserve cancellation was announced, there was a great deal of speculation that Xsan, FCP, or even Mac OS X Server was next. Today's announcements along with the revelations yesterday about an imminent major refresh of FCP should go a long way to assuage our fears from a few months ago.

The "Light Peak" we've been hearing so much about has an official name: Thunderbolt. The DisplayPort on the new MacBook Pro is now also a 10Gbps PCIe bus that could soon usher in the ability to put a fibrechannel connection (among other things) into iMacs and Mac minis when they inevitably acquire the new port with their next product refresh. The next few months are going to be very interesting.