Xserve RAID on FreeBSD

[Chris Shenton]

Christoph Sold <cs at cheasy.de> writes:

> Basically, this unit is a Mac OS X Server providing storage over the
> fibre using the usual suspects (NFS, SMB/CIFS(Samba), AFS). Don't know
> if anybody tried this using fiber channel transport.

I do not believe this is correct.  I believe the Xserve RAID is a 3U
box of HW-RAIDed IDE disks with redundant power supply and RAID
controllers, with FibreChannel connections to a server. Price is
outstanding, 2.5TB for about $11K.

The Xserve is a sweet 1U OSX/UNIX box for which you can buy
reasonably-priced FC adapters to connect it to the RAID.

The RAID box has 2 FC interfaces so you could connect 2 Xserve boxes,
or dual-connect a single Xserve, or connect it to a FC switch. The
Xserver(s) can then export the FC-connected disk via NFS, CIFS, etc.

I'd love to see a front end server acting like a NetApp.
FreeBSD-5.x's snapshot feature gives you one of the nicest features of
the NetApp.  I'd love to hear if anyone's doing this.