Xsan
Speaking of big, fast storage, you may have noticed an item called Xsan, all the way at the bottom of the Server app’s sidebar. Xsan is Apple’s storage area network (SAN) file system that provides massive amounts of data over high-speed Fibre Channel. Xsan supports up to 2 petabytes of data. Promise, whose desktop storage I mention in the preceding section, has rack-mounted, Fibre Channel RAID systems that work with Xsan.
Xsan has features such as quick Spotlight searches through these petabytes of data. Apple says it’s great for film and video editing with Final Cut Pro.
But back to the Server app. The Xsan pane is where you turn on access to Xsan if the Mac must be connected to a Fibre Channel SAN. In addition, the Xsan Admin item in the Server app’s Tools menu is an assistant that helps you set up a new SAN system or connect to an existing one.
Get OS X Mountain Lion Server For Dummies now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
