Continuing the trend set from Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld, the Apple Store closed for an update today - the new business product being XSan 2. Interestingly though, there’s also a product missing from the shops - Apple’s previous RAID storage arrays for XServes.

XSan 2 gives a number of new and improved features: easier setup and configuration - Leopard setup recognises Fibre Channel controllers and configures accordingly, and the rest of the configuration is now handled by wizards. The Admin tool can manage multiple nodes and now has inbuilt realtime monitoring and notification. Most importantly, a single workstation or server can now access multiple XSan volumes at the same time directly, without the slow hop via Ethernet. This is ideal for any IT architecture which works in a staged manner towards the final production environment.

Initial impressions are that this is a solid and useful step up from XSan, and is priced at $999. UK Pricing isn’t yet available at time of writing.

But where have the Apple XServe RAID drive arrays gone? There’s no sign of them on the US site, though they’re still visible for now on the UK site. On the US site all that’s visible are Promise RAID subsystems - it may be that Apple have left the storage market. That’s a shame, as their cost per Gb was one of the best available.

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XServe, XSan, Promise, VTrak, XServe RAID