Active Storage claims that its XRAID boxes are "an evolution in storage for Apple users." With far prettier looks than other models, a Mac OS native suite of configuration and monitoring applications, and at least a commitment to this very vertical market, what we have in our midst is a very welcome alternative to what Apple thrusts upon us, which is Apple's tweaked version of Promise's Vtrack chassis.

From an economic perspective, this will mean a hopefully cheaper box for admin and integrators alike.

Apple's blessed version of the Promise VTrak have to get shipped from Promise to Apple, where they get fitted with special drives and firmware, and then are offered to sales channels with Apple's traditional razor-thin margin. The Active Storage XRAID, however, will be offered through authorized resellers, allowing much higher margins for those resellers. In the long term, this should mean that even though Active have MSRPs that mimic their Promise cousins, street prices for these boxes may be substantially lower.

It's no secret that the aim of Active is to provide a better box than Promise. The box specifications are almost identical as are their MSRPs. So the question then remains, does the XRAID hold up in real-world performance?

Well, to answer that question, some bold marketers at Active surrendered a box, early off the production line, to Meta Media and our unflinching test lab. Here then, is a summary of what we discovered in our 72 hours with the box.

Active Storage today announced a single-controller XRAID ES version of their Apple-centric storage product. There's a handy comparison on Active's site. It's quite a bit cheaper than the dual-controller version. (Note they don't recommend the ES for Xsan use.)

This mirrors (excuse the pun) a similar move by Promise back in January.

This is a bash script I wrote for automating notifications for things that Xsan doesn't notify you about by itself. 318 has quite a few Xsan deployments to keep an eye on, and this helps get a quick overview of volume status and latency for them, so we know which ones need a little extra attention.

Lithium and other similar applications can do some of what we're doing here, but this is a quick way to do it without licensing.

Here's what it does:

1. Grabs volume names by looking at the directories in /Library/Filesystems/Xsan/data
2. Runs cvfsck -nv on the volumes it finds, extracting the Volume Status (Clean or Dirty)
3. Looks through the volumes' current cvlog for hourly latency summaries from the current day, pulling out sysavg
4. f the volume is Dirty, or any of the syavg numbers are above a predefined level, sends a notification email

  Options:

   -h
   Prints a usage summary.

   -l [Latency Level]
   Sets your acceptable latency level. Default is 500. You'll probably want to set that higher, especially if you've got a Promise instead of an Xserve RAID.

   -a [email address]
   Specify the address you want to send notifications to. Default is "root@localhost". You'll probably want to change that too.

I created an installer package, that installs both the script and a launch daemon that runs daily at 11 PM. Or you can just grab the script, sans installer.

Michael Dhaliwal of District13 Computing has updated his white paper of Mac enterprise backup solutions. (via Charles Edge)

First of all, yeah I know it's not really MultiSAN but this is how Apple sells it.

So that we are all clear: this is about how you could set up multiple volumes, hosted by different metadata controllers, within one SAN. And how you could mount that on your clients. All done without Xsan Admin. For some it might be pretty straight forward. But when you don't know how to do it reading this might just save your day.