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Today organizations struggle to balance reduced IT budgets, ever-expanding demands on storage infrastructure, and new regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, that put even more stringent requirements on maintaining corporate data. Something has to give. Enter Apple, with an enterprise-class SAN solution at a fraction of the price of others.
Pool your resources
Using Xsan 2, you can simplify your data management tasks and maximize your storage resources without compromising performance and scalability. Unlike other SAN solutions, which only consolidate hardware physically, Xsan lets you centralize the data as well and thus eliminate complex storage provisioning. And because Xsan is completely interoperable with Quantum’s StorNext File System, you can even provide clients on Windows, Linux, and other UNIX platforms with direct Fibre Channel block-level access to the data in your Xsan-managed storage pool. Investing in an Apple SAN solution will increase the flexibility of your storage infrastructure, provide better utilization of storage resources, and help you lower your IT costs.
Easily allocate resources centrally
As an IT administrator, you can use Xsan 2 to consolidate your data, manage it centrally, and allocate access to any application or any user anywhere on your network. You can then use Xserve systems as “NAS heads” (servers attached to a SAN that provide NAS functionality) to provide scalable, high-performance file services for Mac, Windows, and Linux clients on the network.
On-the-fly expansion
Since you can connect many servers to many storage devices, you can use your IT infrastructure more flexibly and efficiently than if each server had attached storage that it didn’t use fully. In fact, deploying a dedicated storage network with Xsan can make network services faster and more reliable, because one server isn’t the single point of access for stored data. Xsan also makes it easy to scale out storage — simply add more RAID systems to increase SAN capacity and performance.
Information lifecycle management
Mac systems with Xsan 2 can take advantage of real-time, policy-based data management solutions. You can add a Mac with Xsan 2 to an existing infrastructure that uses Quantum’s StorNext Storage Manager. When StorNext Storage Manager is deployed in conjunction with Quantum’s Scalar line of tape libraries, you can set up predefined service levels for different classes of data and automate your data placement and protection objectives.
