Products: Apple

After nearly four years on the market, Apple Xserve RAID is no more. This past February, Apple announced it would be discontinuing its SAN product — which was starting to trail the market because it still employed older technologies such as parallel ATA drives (other manufacturers had moved to SATA) and relied on RAID 5 (which can survive one drive failure, but many other vendors were offering RAID 6 — which can handle the failure of up to two drives).

At the same time, Apple announced Xsan 2 software — an upgrade that simplifies SAN management. The company also partnered with RAID storage manufacturer Promise Technology, which has won a key place on Apple's website. At Macworld, Promise announced that its VTrak E-Class RAID subsystems have been qualified with Xsan 2 — which orchestrates Mac OS X and Final Cut Studio. A Promise RAID subsystem delivers 26 streams of 8-bit uncompressed SD video, and it supports capacities up to 24TB per configuration — at a claimed price point of $1.12 per gigabyte. www.promise.com