Xsan (Apple) on FreeBSD

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Jeff Mohler wrote:

> Im yet to hear of a large Xsan install that stayed Xsan once it grew.
>
> Most, if not all, have gone to netapp or umm..Isilon (spelling) that ive 
> been close to.  Latest large dump of Xsan that I know of was Current TV in 
> San Francisco, for Isilon.
>
> Beware the hype of Xsan, its a money pit.
>
> Then ask em how long it all comes to a halt when a disk fails.

Catching up on an aging thread here -- as far as I know, the XSan parts from 
Mac OS X are closed source, so while you can access XSan storage using 
whatever distributed file systems Apple supports (NFS, CIFS?), you can't use 
FreeBSD to directly access the storage area network.  This is probably fine.

You'll be interested to know, if you don't already, that both NetApp and 
Isilon use FreeBSD as the foundation OS for their products.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge