---
title: WWDC2004 Session 602
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-602
---

# WWDC2004 Session 602

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en morning before we start this session I want to talk a bit about the session that's gonna be coming after this because Exxon is a brand-new technology and we have tons of things we want to talk about we split the content into two sessions the first one is this one introducing X N and the second one is the one right after this 1030 in this room X and in depth so if you're here to learn about what Exxon offers and what it takes to deploy and manage it what to learn how to program for it we highly recommend that you attend both sessions and you just wanted to quickly review what we're going to talk about in these two sessions so in this session we're going to start off by talking about why you may need a Stein file system for are the benefits and we got to spend a pretty good chunk of time talking about all the key features of Excel everything from the basic file system to the management to performance the cross-platform support and we're gonna cover what it takes to deploy exam basically going to go over the basic hardware configuration and with a few examples and then to conclude the session we're going to talk about different software and hardware product apple offers to do the same and also build different solutions on top of that so that should keep us busy for next hour to hour and a half and then at 10:30 we're going to talk about how Excel works from engineering perspective so for example we're going to talk about things like what gets passed on wire when you make a filesystem call and we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the administration of X and in fact we're gonna have a demo of X and admin software using it to set up Sam from scratch or almost from scratch so that should be pretty fun right and we're going to talk about different aspects of administration such as command-line tools then we're going to talk about a few tips for developers thinks they should watch out for when's accessing some volumes example in sync such as scalability and locking and other issues and the last week we're going to talk about excellent developer API we will have a demo for a couple sample application using that API and it's pretty visual so it should be pretty entertaining so is that I would like to introduce the Speaker of the first session Tom Morgan director of server and storage software from worldwide product marketing good morning everyone so its first thing in the morning and I just I was playing hockey last night until late so I'm going to try to move along quickly and hopefully keep myself going and keep all of you going as well I have a few questions to ask right from the beginning how many of you are familiar with storage area networks in general okay that's good how many of you have actually deployed a storage area network all right how many of you put a SAN or a cluster filesystem on that storage area network and how many of you have written a cluster filesystem yeah see I knew Ted Klein was in the audience so I knew I could find someone who had done that at least so I'm gonna take you through kind of an overview of storage storage area networks and anxn give you some background information on xn and storage area networks in general just to make sure that we're all using the same terminology because in the industry the terminology somewhat varies from vendor to vendor so take you through what we're doing I'm gonna give you some information on our cluster or our sand file system and then I'm going to conclude by taking you through the range of products we now offer for IT deployments so let's let's jump right in real quickly this is xn and we refer to it as the sand file system for Mac OS 10 and I can't say this will be the final mock-up of the box but this is this is our product we introduced this at NAB in April it actually won an award as best of show at NAB people were very excited about it we demonstrated it at NAB I think we had 6 terabytes of storage in a single volume shared among 5 six different systems these were desktop systems and we were doing video real-time online video editing from those systems so it provides some really really great performances some great features okay there we go so as a background err for some of you I know some of you this will be very trivial on the other hand for some of you I just want to bring you all up to speed on sort of why we decided we needed to have a sand file system or a cluster file system and I'm gonna take you through the basics of storage architectures but I'll move along quickly so we don't don't more some of you in the audience so direct attached storage or DES this is very very simple everybody does this it's plugging an external storage device into a server or a desktop the desktop or server mounts that storage device and of course if it's a file server it can actually share that storage to clients across your network and it does that with typical network file sharing protocols so it's pretty straightforward you can use fibre channel or a scuzzy interconnect between the server of the desktop of course you could use firewire if you wanted to as well there's a number of direct attached storage interconnects today you could use USB and share that if you wanted to now the one thing about this is that the file server becomes a potential bottleneck for the performance of that overall system the file server is the only way to access that external storage and the file server is the final arbiter on who gets access to that storage so everything goes through that one file server now not only is it a performance bottleneck but it is a potential single point of failure as well now what came out and came into vogue a few years ago when as devices network-attached storage the reason these are very interesting is that these are purpose-built appliances for sharing storage over the network so in a sense it's just like a direct attached storage device except that it's storage with an embedded file server it's a good way to think about it so it has some really great advantage one of which is it's a queue typically Nazz devices are extremely easy to deploy very quick to get them up and running and that's because they are single purpose devices their whole point is to share storage on the network at the same time they do suffer from some of the same performance and scalability limitations as direct-attached storage now there's there's a whole range of very sophisticated things that some companies offer in terms of storage virtualization services where they can actually make multiple NAS devices appear like and and on the network appear like a single device or they can eliminate some of these single points of failure but it is fairly complex to deploy the storage virtualization software to accomplish this now in a storage area network this is where multiple storage devices are attached to a fiber channel network that's really what a storage area network is all about now fibre channel today as well as ice Guzzi you could use a different type of network called ice cozy this is scuzzy protocol over IP over Ethernet but for all intents and purposes today when I talk about a San I'm going to be talking about a sand-based on fibre channel so we have multiple des storage devices connected to a fiber channel switch and then we have multiple servers that are able to access those storage devices now a key thing is that they essentially access the storage devices and in a sense they share the storage devices but they don't share the data on the storage devices I'll get into a little bit of detail on that right now so why a SAN filesystem well as I said a SAN you have multiple computers accessing the same storage device an example here we've got an X Server aid connected to a fiber channel switch the Xserve raid presents to raid controllers hence the two fiber channel lines coming down from the top and the fiber channel switched to the 3x herbs that have shown here these three excerpts are connected via fibre channel to the fiber channel switch and they can see the Xserve raid each one of them can in fact they could take that storage from the X raid and they can reshare it using network protocols such as AFP SMB or NFS across the network to these clients so they can do the exact same thing that an AZ device or direct-attached storage can do however the challenge with this before you have a SAN file system is that each raid set is effectively a volume and the volumes are connected separately to each one of the servers so you have a B and C up and they're denoted by the colors and a B and C are mounted by each of those servers only one server can mount one filesystem so the server could mount multiple file systems but the file system or the a or the B of the C can only be mounted by one server can't be mounted by two servers at the same time so each raid set is mapped to a server that's a process called provisioning in the sand world and that's what that's all about the reason a SAN file system is interesting is you eliminate these data silos keep in mind that server a over here only sees the data in volume a server B only sees the data in volume B server C only sees the data and volume C that's before a SAN file system after a SAN file system you can actually have data a B and C as denoted up a hot Bob in a single volume so this would be a single three three and a half terabyte volume on the Xserve raid and that volume can be seen by each of these servers so this is kind of a subtle difference between network-attached storage and sans in that the filesystem used for a sand can actually the Mel volumes created by that filesystem can actually be mounted directly with direct block level access by each of the servers or desktops that that's attached to the sand so multiple computers all three of these computers can read and write to the same volume at the same time and is block-level access very very different from in a sense from when you have a network file system it may be sharing a file system to multiple computers but final arbitration block-level access to the volume that it's sharing is arbitrated by the file server itself by that single file server this is very different and of course it could we share that volume to all of these clients as well so now we have three servers able to share the data that's on that volume out to the network now the nice thing about a SAN file system is it's very very easy to scale so you want to add more storage you've gone past three and a half terabytes and you want to go to five or six terabytes of storage you literally add the storage in you can grow the file system and all of the systems that are attached directly to the file system simply see a larger volume with more space for more data now again the other thing you can do is you can add more servers to the to the san as well and share the data in the volume through more file servers so you can literally get more Network performance out of the sand than you would get with having a single server sharing a volume because now you have three four or five or six as we show here servers able to share the data that's on the same volume so that's why a sand file system is very interesting so a little overview of X and X sands for high-performance storage networking so it's very very fast in fact when you setup an X and system properly configured it'll be I don't say this is a lot of you it'll be much much faster than the internal disk drive on your system in fact you will get whatever the storage architecture that you deploy can give you X n is very very lightweight in terms of its over overhead on the storage infrastructure it has a high availability architecture so you can imagine a system like this is going to deploy be deployed in mission-critical environments we've done a lot of things to make sure that when you deploy it that way if any single failure happens somewhere on the system we've got you covered and I'm going to take you through some of that as well xn provides some really really interesting volume management tools and that's where we get into some of the nomenclature I mentioned and I'm gonna walk you through a little bit of the volume management tools and show you what we're talking about there and then later on I know the guys are going to show you how to actually set up a sand volume accent is going to be easy to use and when I say easy I don't want to be I don't want to be you know really lightweight about this whole thing obviously you need to know about storage area networks to get one built and one running even before you put X and on it you're going to need to know a little bit about sand file systems and how to deploy them but for most of the mainstream configurations where we're hoping that our management tools will help you get those up and running in a nice optimized way without having to know - too much detail about the innards of the sand file system so acting a little bit about that and and we have a great story when it comes to compatibility and interoperability and I'm gonna run you through all of that because no sands solution stands on its own no sand solution from a single vendor really stands on its own unique partners involved to be successful in this space so what is it it's a 64-bit cluster file system so it's a full 64-bit cluster file system now on on Panther that means that you'll get up to 16 terabytes values that's the limitation built into Panther today on Tiger that limitation goes away with X and so on Tiger you'll be able to be able to build very very large if you don't think 16 terabytes is large enough very large volumes now to give you some idea of what's happening in the video space there are customers that have asked us for over a hundred terabytes of storage in a single volume and so we're gonna take a shot at meeting their needs as we go through the deployments of xn you can obviously have billions of files up to 64 concurrent clients can access an xn volume so what does that mean that means that you can have up to 64 systems I showed you six systems and the largest deployment I showed here you can have up to 64 servers or desktops or mix of the two accessing the same volume direct block level access over fibre channel to that one volume and of course you could create multiple volumes as well and have a different 64 at you know connect to a different set of volumes that does not mean that you are in any way limited by the number of network clients that are coming in over AFP SMB or NFS and connecting into a file server that is directly connected to the sand we're only talking about here the number of machines that are directly connected to the sand and of course it gives you file level locking and what this really means is that on a single volume you can have multiple readers and multiple writers so you can have multiple computers writing to the same volume at the same time and you can have multiple computers reading from the same volume and in fact in this case reading from the same vial at the same time the only limitation if you call it that is that you can only have one computer writing to a particular file at a given time so from an H a perspective do a couple of things there's a thing called a metadata controller and I'm going to show you a little bit more about what that's all about in subsequent slides but the metadata controller is like the traffic cop for the sand what the metadata controller does is that anytime a computer on the sand wants to open a file read a file write to a file it first talks to the metadata controller and it says you know can I open that file I'd like a read/write access to the file XYZ and the metadata controller checks and says ok no one else has got read/write access right now so here you go you can have readwrite access and you know here's where the file is located but note the difference from a network file system it doesn't say here's the file it says here's where the file is located and then the computer that requested the file goes in over fibre channel directly to the storage at the block level and reads or writes to that file so that's what metadata controller failover is all about is providing a secondary metadata controller you can imagine if the metadata controller fails then you've got a real problem on your network on your sand because nobody knows if they're allowed to have access to a file where the file is located and so forth xn comes out of the box with support for metadata controller failover if any metadata controller on your sand fails the xn computers the computers running XM will get together and they will nominate another one of these computers to take over the duties of the metadata controller they will do that automatically and that will happen within seconds of a detected failure and the metadata controller so that's what metadata controller failover is all about one other added note about it because we ship xn with the metadata controller software built in unlike a lot of other sand vendors any X and system connected to the sand can be the metadata controller so we support something called cascading failover this means if the second metadata controller if that person who stumbled into the machine and kicked the power cord out stumbles into the next metadata controller and kicks the power cord out then the next system on the sand will take over and so as long as any one system any one xn system is up and running you have access to your data we think that's extremely important with these systems of course the file systems journaled you'd expect that and that's why we can actually recover the file system within seconds of a failure the other metadata coentrão takes over accesses the file system runs the journals and you're up and running within seconds we support something called fibre channel multipathing so some of you may have purchased an X serve and you may have gotten the fibre channel card that goes along with it we have a fiber channel host bus adapter or HBA that goes into the machine so that you can connect a fiber channel cable into the excerpt or into a Power Mac g5 the thing is that that card actually supports two connectors and you could actually run both those connectors to the fiber channel switch where they can see the storage and the reason we do that is that we use both of those connectors in X and this is what multipathing is called it refers to and we can use both those connectors to send requests for packets or blocks of storage and receive those blocks of storage so you can actually get a theoretical 4 gigabits per second each fiber channel connection provides 2 gigabits per second you can get a theoretical 4 gigabits per second into an X served g5 for example they keep in mind that that's theoretical because you'd have to have a storage architecture on the other side of the sand you'd have to have hard drives and raid controllers and so forth that can actually deliver 4 gigabits per second but if you had that you could get it in there the other thing with multipathing is if the one of the past breaks so someone steps that same guy who stumbling around your data center actually breaks one of the fiber cables that are running to your storage for joining to your switch the other connection continues to work and the filesystem continues to function and that computer continues to have access to the data that's on the on the storage so that's fiber channel multipathing there's one last feature now this feature is interesting because it actually requires that you those of you are a developers be involved in this and this is called bandwidth reservation now I want to kind of describe in a sense I mentioned that you know if you have theoretical 4 gigabits per second you can get that into the computer if you have the storage architecture to support it it can get very expensive to say support for gigabits per second into every computer that you have on the sand those of you have tried to do some of this understand what I mean you can buy a lot you have to buy a lot of storage to be able to do that you have to have a lot of disk drive spinning in order to be able to deliver data like that so when most people design their sand they design it to deliver the aband with that they need for typical operations they look at the mean they look at what they're usually doing every day day to day so if you're a video person and you're doing SD video you'll design your sand to give you multiple streams of SD video and audio and it's some type of audio to to each of the systems that are connected each of the editing base for example that are connected to your sand in the same sense if you're setting it up for file storage you'll take a look at each of the servers that you have sharing the files across the network and say how much bandwidth storage bandwidth do I need to provide for each of these machines you'll sum it all up and you'll try to create an environment that delivers that from a storage architecture perspective now in some cases someone may walk in and say you know what and this this happens in the video space a lot you walk in and suddenly someone wants to capture HD video right into the sand now that's a critical operation it's going to take an hour or two or three depends on what you're doing and you want to let them do that and you want to make sure that while they're doing that if some editor comes in to another station and sits down and decides to edit some stuff that they can't mess up this critical capture off to rate operation that's happening in one of the stations so the way that works is that the software managing the capture operation can be written to use our bandwidth reservation api's we have a set api's for this so it can be written to use that and so the administrator when they set up the capture operation can say I want this particular operation in this particular file handle for example to get X Y percent of the available storage bandwidth so you know what your storage bandwidth generally is and you say well I want to make sure that this guy always has 65 percent of the available storage bandwidth no matter what these other stations try to do fail them if you have to make sure this guy always gets everything he needs and that's what bandwidth reservation allows you to do you can allocate a percent of the available bandwidth to a specific file handle you do that for certain critical operations that don't happen very often so that you can literally get more bandwidth out of your system in a sense it's not going to give you any more than you have but you can deliver a certain amount of that bandwidth directly to one operation when you need to do that sort of thing so that's what bandwidth reservation is all about from a volume management perspective we support a range of things and I'm gonna walk you through a little bit with this with some pictures storage pooling so we group multiple storage devices together really multiple raid devices typically and we'll you'll hear me with others refer to them as Lunz logical unit numbers alone is simply a logical grouping of storage that's hidden behind some form of RAID controller typically and and so for example with the Xserve raid as many of you know it has two raid controllers in it seven drives on either toss ID attached to each of the raid controllers if you took the seven over here and just did they raid five across the mall to that RAID controller the seven over here raid five across them to that controller when you looked at it across the fibre channel network with X and soar with X and admin tools you would see two Lunz and these two Lunz grouped together and something we call the storage pool in fact you can group multiple Lunz across multiple devices into multiple storage pools in fact so I'll show you how we can do that sort of thing and what that's all about we can dynamically scale volumes as I mentioned earlier so you can grow these volumes we support things like volume mapping and affinities I'm gonna go into a little bit of detail on this you can decide with the xn admin tools which systems connected to the sand are able to mount which volumes and you can have that mount occur you can force that mount or force that amount rate from your admin console and as I mentioned the admin console works remotely so you can actually run that on a power book or an iBook and connect into your sand remotely and take care of that type of management affinities I'll go through it's better to do a diagram for that because it becomes really really clear what affinities are all about with the diagram and we do have offline defragmentation tools now the file system is designed and by design designed to minimize if not eliminate fragmentation but there are of course certain operations that can happen on a file system that are sort of out of the out of the fringes that can cause some amount of fragmentation and so we include the defragmentation tools along with a product so that you can run those if necessary on the file system so let's talk about how we create a volume I mentioned the Xserve raid I build a raid set as I mentioned from say those seven drives I format it or initialize it I should say raid five and I do that with the raid admin tools this is we have to be very clear about what we tools we use with xn because you will not be using Disk Utility with xn ok Disk Utility is for creating hfs+ or ufs volumes and doing software raid X and has its own volume format and so when you create an X and volume you'll be you using the ex an admin tools to do this so we create a raid 5 LUN we haven't got a volume yet but we've got a LUN it shows up on fibre channel we can take multiple Lunz as I mentioned and put them into a storage pool and the storage pool allows you to group multiple LUNs that are similar to each other so take multiple raid 5 ones each one say is one and a quarter terabytes in size and you group them together what xn does is automatically stripes data across the storage pool so now you have this logical grouping of storage this logical pool of raid 5 loans you can actually create multiple pools and put them into a single volume and on the example I'm showing here we have a raid 5 storage pool made up of one or more raid 5 Lunz and a raid 1 or a mirrored set a storage pool made up of one or more raid 1 or mirrored sets ok and we've pooled the two things together we haven't pulled them together we've grouped them together in a single volume now some of you out there saying well that's kind of cool but where does my day to go right I mean does it go on the raid 5 hardware does it go on the raid 1 hardware just exactly where does it go and that's what's kind of interesting about affinities so we all know the raid 5 in theory at least would be a little bit faster than the raid 1 in typical hardware storage hardware the read one however is mirrored so it's actually the most protected type of storage that you have it's mirror it's a mirrored set so you have fastest and most protected now what you can do is you can actually through affinities associate those storage pools with directories or folders in the finder or folders in that volume so if you had a couple of desktops hooked up as I show in here you can literally provide the user with two folders in this case I've called the mo fastest and most protected you could call them work in progress and final work for example and the work in progress could go to the raid 5 and the final work could go to the raid 1 so in a sense in reality affinities will really help you set up interesting workflows across the sand and move data around the sand into the type or category or class of storage that is relevant or most useful most appropriate for the type of data that you want to store in it so this is really interesting feature of X an and and I invite you to check that out as well from Road administration perspective as I mentioned fairly easy to configure we do real time monitoring will do event notifications will do things like email you or page you in the event of a metadata controller failover a fiber channel problem a quota problem we support usage quotas we have both soft and hard quotas and and we do have integration into LDAP and this is where I'll take a little a little digression here if you'll allow me this so from from a sand perspective the filesystem sits underneath the standard sort of API set filesystem API set in Mac OS 10 and Mac OS 10 server so for all intents and purposes it just looks like another locally attached internal if you will volume on your system or drive on your system and this is really really interesting for a couple of reasons now with a couple of caveats to that internal drive looks and behaves mostly like ufs follows POSIX lock locking semantics and is case sensitive so all accent systems we'll be case sensitive and we are relying on all of you to do the proper thing from a locking standpoint in your applications so when you open a file for a user for readwrite access open it and typically in carbon this takes care of itself automatically but if you're doing a cocoa app or a UNIX application open it and assert the POSIX lock for that operation and we will adhere to that and use that in xn to make sure that your data doesn't get trampled by some other user now so that's where xn sets and the reason that's interesting is that on our systems that means that you can control access to Xen to the folders and the files in X and using a directory server so when the person logs into the machine or when they remotely attach to a server and go in and using say a file service they have an identity a uie D that has been given to them by the directory server at login time and all of the machines connected to the directory server in other words all the machines on the sand connected to the directory server recognize that UID and we'll use that UID to determine whether or not that person has access to a folder or file on the sand and because xn is coming out in the fall jump ahead a little bit that xn is coming out in the fall right now we're adhering to POSIX permissions but not Ackles on X and so we use the permissions model that's built into Panther for that but that gives you some control over who has access over data in X and gives you full integration with an LDAP directory server and for that matter Kerberos infrastructure as well because we're sitting as I said below the filesystem layer in the in the operating system so I mentioned the complete sand solution and mentioned that you need partners to really pull this off so from a hardware perspective we offer Xserve raid and we qualified on Xserve raid they'll be qualified with the Xserve g4 and g5 it will also be qualified with the Power Mac g5 and with Power Mac g4 s back to duel 800 or better we have our own fibre channel PCI card that we're qualifying the system with as well it's going to be qualified with our professional software including Mac OS 10 Mac OS 10 server and many of our professional applications we have worked with the fibre channel switch vendors and we're testing with these switches there's a list of switches on our website that we're testing with from brocade cue logic and Emulex so check those out and from a data management and interoperability standpoint we have worked with Adi C to ensure that you can add windows linux and other unix systems to the sand and adi c is supporting Xsan with their store next file system other store next that's the compatibility is with their store next file system and they're also supporting exam with their store next management suite now what that means is that you can use their data management tools as a foundation for a whole for your for something called some of you would be familiar with this but something called information lifecycle management and this is policy based storage management and they have some really really great products to do this and you'll be able to use those with X and to do things like I mean I think of it as backup on steroids but basically to be able to migrate your data from tier 1 to tier 2 storage and migrate it all the way back to tape so and to automate a lot of that process so just a little view of how this can happen you can literally put Xsan on say a Power Mac g5 and Xserve g5 have that connected in it sees the sand volume there's a metadata controller so X ends up there running on another excerpt g5 as well but you could literally take a couple of servers running Windows or Linux and have those servers connected into the sand as well now those machines would be running the store next file system from Adi C and you can you can purchase it from them it will install and run and allow you to see the EXCI involuntary to back up and maintain all of the data in your sand as well so this is a full complete solution that we're offering here now take a drink of water here but I want to take you through quickly some example deployments and then the kind of walkthrough of some example deployments I also want to show you how you specifically how you set up some of the infrastructure for xn now in the later session they're gonna get right under the covers and show you more of this but I want to give all of you kind of an overview of how of all is that all of this works so when you're setting up an exon you need a storage device such as the next serve raid you need a fiber channel switch you need obviously the xn systems the systems that are going to access the storage and this will be servers or desktops and you run X n on each of these and they all connect in over fibre channel to the storage area network one of these systems you're going to denote or decide is going to be your metadata controller remember that traffic cop for the sand so fiber channel network you get high-speed you'll get on each fiber roughly well roughly you'll get their scope for two gigabits or 200 megabits per second and we have numbers up on the website on what the Xserve rate can actually give you sustained but it's on the order of 180 190 megabytes per second sustained throughput so and correct me guys if I'm wrong on that one but that's my understanding of those numbers so you get that out of the Xserve raid and you can of course provide that to each of those machines now each of these systems I want to be very clear about this need to have a copy of xn running on them so you buy four copies of xn you put it on the four systems install that get a configure using them X an admin tools select one machine as the metadata controller decide and wait which of the other machines should actually be the backup or standby metadata control or if the metadata controller fails and you're on your way well sort of there's a back-channel network that needs to be deployed with X and we refer to it as the metadata network now I don't want to confuse you with the metadata that's associated with the spotlight technology well metadata we're talking about here is filesystem metadata file system locks and locations and all of that sort of stuff so the filesystem metadata is moved around on a separate metadata metadata network now this is just a tcp/ip Ethernet network that you set up between all of these systems and what it provides is really out-of-band communications and the reason this is important and the reason that's architected this way is that what you're sending back and forth was metadata as small packets so small requests I need to open up this file ok you can open up this file fibre channel is really optimized for large chunks of data and so if we were to take all the metadata operations that would happen on a large sand and run them across fibre channel we'd be bogging down your fibre channel network where all your storage performance is with metadata communications so to optimize around this we put the data the big chunks of information in on the storage network on the fibre channel network and we put the metadata on a separate network now the actual metadata actually lives on the sand but it's accessed and cached by the metadata controller and then it's controlled and access to it is controlled by the metadata controller so this separate out-of-band network now I'll have a lot of people have come up to me and said so do I have to use a separate network for the metadata network and the answer is well it's IP you don't have to use one but if you use your local area network for example and someone initiates a large FTP transfer across that network for whatever reason that may inhibit some of the metadata traffic on that network and that may slow down your file system and almost guarantee it'll slow down your file system because that will delay those packets being sent to the metadata controller so we recommend very strongly recommend is that you use a separate network for this metadata controller network now the good news is that you can do that and you can still share the data over Ethernet when you're using for example an X or g5 because we do have two Gigabit Ethernet connectors on the back of the Xserve g5 so use one of them for the metadata network and use the second one for your local area network and as I mentioned you can then share the data using common networking protocols to as many clients as you want over your local neck over your local network now these machines to be clear the bottom ones the desktops that are shown here do not have to be running X and you do not need an X and license for them of course with Mac OS 10 server you get an unlimited client license you can connect up as many clients to do file sharing with the unlimited licensing as you want and we don't care whether that data comes from if it comes from the sand that's great so as I mentioned dual Gigabit Ethernet in the excerpt g5 to support this now you could also in another sense use this to backup some kind of backup and use this as the storage pool for a web service as well whether it's a website QuickTime streaming server or something like that and have Internet clients connected into them so but in any case there's two networks there's the main network where the data transfer happens and there's the metadata network which is where the file system does all of its operations with the exception of doing the actual block level access to storage which happens over the fibre channel network so when we deploy X in a kind of a post production environment we deploy X in two desktops I'm sure those of you in the audience who do a lot of work in video so you create a sand volume using multiple xserve raids fibre channel switch metadata controller server makes a nice metadata controller and then you set up the desktops with access to the sand you can also on the same network put a server there have it we share some of that information using the QuickTime streaming server so you can imagine a workflow where you're doing video editing and when for example at the end of the day or at the end of the their their time working on this project and editor makes a QuickTime movie and posts it into a special folder where the QuickTime streaming server can share it out to say producer or director who wants to just check in over the network without having to come down to the editing Bay and of course you could put appropriate security and access control around all of that so this is an example of using X and post-production workflow another thing I'm not showing here that you do have to setup again is that private Ethernet network that connects all of these systems and the metadata controller so there'll be a private Ethernet network you can multi-home these systems so you could use a second Ethernet connection you can put another an external well in a gigabit card into the Xserve g5 for example or you could even use the airport connection on the Xserve g5 to connect it to the internet or connect it to your local network but you want to reserve one Ethernet port for the metadata network computational clusters are another area that we're looking at with X an and in this case we're showing a very large cluster for small clusters as I said up to 64 systems can it connect to the sand so if you had a small cluster of 4 16 32 systems you could actually have them all connected directly to the sand over fibre channel with block level access to a single storage pool which means they all can be using the exact same data writing back to the exact same location at the same time now if you have a very large deployment and of course we use the Virginia Tech one all the time 1100 g5s now they of course xn isn't available so they weren't able to do this but if they had chosen to do so they could have actually created an environment where of those 1100 say 20 of them 25 of them pick 55 of them say 55 of them were connected into the sand directly and those 55 were the head nodes for another 20 machines in the cluster so the head node connected block-level fibre channel directly into the sand and then what it does is uses NFS to share the data or AFP to share the data to the other X serves in the cluster the other 24 which it's responsible now you've just and you create a network between those 20 in the head node another 20 in the head node and you know now you've covered 1100 machines and 455 of them their feeding data or their getting data directly from the sand at very high speed and they're able to reshare that over say Gigabit Ethernet to another 20 now I can tell you that beach trying to reshare that data over Gigabit Ethernet to another 1100 so this is a way of more easily or more quickly distributing the data around a computational cluster so I'm gonna go through a few of our products here and I'm run through some of that as soon as I get another drink of water here I'll run through some of this and give you an idea of the kind of products we're offering in the space and then I want to give you an idea of why we think we can be very successful in this space in both video regular storage consolidation projects that I've shown you and also in computational clustering where price performance is really what counts so Mac OS 10 server qualified with X with with X and delivers all sorts of great services so most of you caught the the earlier sessions on what the next version of the server is all about will be qualifying Tiger server with xn as well when Tiger server is closer to availability excerpt g5 phenomenal performance and a 1u server an amazing box and I'm sure you've seen some of the sessions on that as well we do offer a fiber channel PCI card many of you may not have realized that this is a PCI card that goes into an X serve or into it Power Mac and n delivers a dual port 2 gigabits per second on each channel so it's a really really nice card it says 64-bit 66 megahertz PCI card neat thing is we actually include the cables and and these cables on the street would be something like 150 200 dollars a piece but we include the cables as part of the package for the PCI card we have the Xserve raid this is a three and half terabyte solution in a 3u enclosure again very very high speed if you stripe across the channels as it says over 336 megabytes per second striping across the two controllers very easy to set up this is raid setup in three easy steps very very nice solution this one's actually qualified not only from Mac OS 10 Windows and Linux and as we said it'll be qualified for X N and nice solution $3.00 per gigabyte I have this joke I have with just as a digression with the guy who runs our server and storage hardware I said he should only have three slides on xserve raid the first one should say $3.00 per gigabyte the second one should say $3.00 per gigabyte and the third one should say did I mention $3.00 per gigabyte this is a beautiful beautiful box an X and and as I mentioned xn concurrent access shared volumes up to 64 computers a lot of great features in there from a high availability or H a standpoint gives you direct block level high speed access over fibre channel to the storage provide some really really cool volume management capabilities comes with some great remote administration tools and of course we have great cross-platform support with full interoperability with the store next file system from Adi C it's a really really complete solution there and we have some great servers and storage support options and we got a lot of questions on this yesterday and I just invite you to check out the latest offerings that we offer in that space I do want to run you through the prices the thing that's key here and the reason I'm running through some of the marketing slides right now is that a lot of people have said to us look we look at I scuzzy we look at fibre channel we not sure what's going to happen but it sure looks like I scuzzy is going to take over and when we look at it we say well first of all you'll never be doing video over ice Guzzi or not in the foreseeable future and in fact it's very very difficult to get any kind of high performance out of ice Guzzi and when you do you get into using really interesting proprietary hardware to do that and that drives the expense way up most people want I scuzzy because it's cheaper than fiber channel that's the clear reason why they want that sort of thing so we took a look at it we feel that fiber channel is actually ripe for for price reduction and so we're going to change this market entirely and so we're offering these products at an incredibly low price compared to anything else on the market yes I know so 999 dollars for 10 server unlimited client license xserve g5 $3,000 10 server is included with that the PCI card is $500 with the cables included the Xserve raid that $11,000 price is with everything you can put in it three-and-a-half terabytes of storage hundred twenty eight Meg's of cash etc etc and then xn under a thousand dollars per node and unlimited capacity so so some of you know that's that's easily from a software standpoint that's a fifth to a tenth of the price of comparable solutions on the market today and that's no exaggeration you can check it out with other vendors it's a fifth to tenth the price of comparable solutions and many solutions actually charge you on the basis of the amount of storage that you put in place many solutions charge you extra for the metadata controller software all of that stuff is built into X and so as I said we're driving down the cost of this infrastructure xn will be available in the fall of 2004 so we're gonna have it out to you in the fall of 2004 xn is in beta today we made our first beta available at NAB there is a program up on the site Apple comm /x an and there's a little link hidden over in the corner referring to the beta program so you can go to apple.com / x + / beta if you want to sign up for the beta program now the great thing about this in a sense is we've had several hundred p we'll already sign up for the program in a couple of months that we've been making it available and I will tell you if you want to be part of the program this is why I'm fascinated that there's been that many people sign up you have to have an extra raid you have to have a qualified fiber channel switch and you have to have two or more of either Xserve g5s Xserve g-force or Power Mac g5 and you have to have our fiber channel PCI cards so in reality that's that's you know 30 40 thousand dollars worth of gear that you have to take offline and use it for X and testing yeah they really appreciate I know there's a lot of you out there in the audience today who are doing that with us and we really really appreciate it if you are interested in doing that go sign up at the website and and we'll get you the bit we are backlogged today in terms of requests we've just been overwhelmed with them but we really appreciate