Mac server recovery

With over 20 years of data recovery experience and nearly 200 data recovery engineers worldwide, Kroll Ontrack^® has the capacity and technical expertise required to solve complex Apple Mac data loss disasters.

Our expert engineers can recover data on all of the following Mac servers:

• Xsan
• Xserve RAID

Please contact our data recovery consultants on 0800 243 996 to learn about our Mac server recovery capabilities

Xsan

Xsan is Apple Inc.'s high-performance shared disk file system for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server.

Xsan is an Apple branded version of Quantum's Stornext software with minor enhancements designed for Apples OSX operating systems. Xsan enables the sharing of one or more Xserve RAID devices with multiple Xserve or Macintosh systems. Xsan will also worth with third party fibre channel storage devises with limited support from Apple. With the Xsan file system installed, these computers can read and write to the same storage volume at the same time. Xsan is a complete SAN solution which includes the metadata controller software, the file system client software, and integrated setup, management and monitoring tools.

According to the Xsan homepage: "You may also use Xsan in a cross-platform environment alongside Windows-, UNIX- and Linux-based systems, using the Quantum StorNext File System, which is 100% interoperable with Xsan."

Expand your network horizons with Xsan, an enterprise-class storage area network (SAN) solution that’s surprisingly affordable. Xsan lets multiple computers concurrently access terabytes — even petabytes — of storage on Xserve RAID over high-speed Fibre Channel.

• High-performance storage networking
  Xsan takes advantage of the 64-bit file system in Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” — so users in your organization can share files and volumes up to two petabytes (2PB) in size. Dozens of systems on the SAN can read and write to shared storage simultaneously, unlike other solutions which gate access at the volume level. Even better, using a SAN lets you pool data across multiple RAID devices for better performance, while each client can access this centralized data as if connected directly to it. And by connecting users directly to a high-speed Fibre Channel network, Xsan eliminates the need to transfer files over slower Ethernet-based networks. Using Fibre Channel multipathing, in which two Fibre Channel cables connect a computer to the SAN, an Xsan client can theoretically achieve throughput of up to 1.6GBps, perfect for multiple editors working on a video project or a compute cluster that needs fast access to data to ensure each node crunches at full capacity.

Provisioning is History. Xsan lets you pool storage devices such as Xserve RAID together and give direct access to this pool to each client computer. Such elegant data consolidation eliminates unused space and means you’ll never have to assign storage to each machine separately again, because they all access the same volume.

• Mission-Critical Redundancy
  Xsan includes high-availability features to eliminate potential single points of failure, so you can use high-performance storage networking for enterprise consolidation and network-attached storage (NAS) replacement projects. Xsan uses one system connected to the SAN, called a metadata controller, to manage access to shared storage. If this machine fails for any reason, Xsan picks another computer on the SAN to take over this role. Cascading metadata controller failover ensures that you can access your data as long as any one system on your SAN is active. In the event of a loose cable, Xsan uses multipathing to automatically route traffic to the system through a second cable on dual-port Apple Fibre Channel HBA. And during critical operations, you can clear a path on your SAN for any system using Xsan bandwidth reservation.
  
• Easy to Set Up, Easy to Manage
  As you’d expect from Apple server and storage products, Xsan includes accessible tools to administer your SAN anywhere on the network. Xsan Admin helps you get the most from your storage resources with user and group quotas, as well as affinities to associate files and folders with specific classes of storage. As with Xserve RAID, you can monitor performance remotely or let Xsan notify you of events via email or pager.
  
• Keep Your Network in Tune
  Use the new Xsan Tuner application to test the data and video transfer capabilities of your storage area network and its Xsan volumes. Xsan Tuner can simulate both standard UNIX reads and writes, as well as Final Cut Pro video reads and writes for a variety of common video formats. You can also use the Xsan Tuner to see if your SAN can handle planned workloads — before you put it into production use. Download the Xsan Tuning Guide to help you understand the Xsan Tuner results, as well as for suggestions for optimizing your SAN performance.
  
• Plays Well With Others
  Xsan delivers incredible performance on Mac Pro, Xserve and Xserve RAID. You can use most Mac OS X and Mac OS X server software, including Apple’s Final Cut Studio. To deploy Xsan, you will need a qualified third-party Fibre Channel switch. You may also use Xsan in a cross-platform environment alongside Windows-, UNIX- and Linux-based systems, using the Quantum StorNext File System, which is 100% interoperable with Xsan. Xsan also works well with Quantum’s Scalar line of tape libraries and policy-based data management tools to reduce your information lifecycle management costs.

X Serve RAID

Xserve RAID is a mass-storage device offered by Apple Inc.. Xserve RAID holds up to 14 hot-swappable Ultra-ATA hard drives, and current models have a maximum capacity of 10.5 TB when filled with 750 GB modules. Xserve RAID can be configured for most RAID levels. It is rack-mountable and is 3U high.

Xserve RAID manages its hard drives with two identical RAID controller chipsets. The controllers are independent, but not redundant; each manages seven of the storage array's fourteen drives, given a failure of one of the controllers the other cannot take over its duties. Xserve RAID does, however, have redundant cooling units and power supplies. Xserve RAID's ports are two Fibre Channel ports for regular data transfer, a 10/100 Ethernet port for remote management, and a serial port for UPS communication via the Simple Signaling Protocol.

Apple markets Xserve RAID mainly as a companion to Xserve in file server and high-performance technical computing applications, but the storage array is also useful in some professional environments such as non-linear video editing. Also, Apple has certified Xserve RAID for use with some other vendors' servers, such as those running Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Due to the cross-platform support available, users do not need a Mac to administer the Xserve RAID. Apple ships a CD-ROM with the device containing the Xserve RAID Admin Tools, a Java software application that runs on most operating systems -- including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Sun Solaris.

• Wide array of platforms
  Xserve RAID supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5 and 0+1 using the hardware RAID processor, and supports levels 10, 30 and 50 combining hardware RAID capabilities with software RAID in Mac OS X. In addition, Xserve RAID works well paired with Windows, Linux, Solaris or NetWare servers, making it perfect for mission-critical data storage.
  Meet the elegantly engineered companion to Apple’s highly regarded Xserve server hardware. This cutting-edge, self-contained storage solution holds up to 14 hot-swappable Apple Drive Modules — a massive 10.5TB of data — in a rack-optimized storage enclosure.
  Xserve RAID features a breakthrough Apple-designed architecture that combines affordable, high-capacity Ultra ATA drive technology with an industry-standard 2Gb Fibre Channel interface for reliable — and incredibly fast — data access. Xserve RAID is hands-down the best value in external RAID storage. Xserve RAID works well with Mac OS X Server, and you can use it with Windows-, Linux-, Solaris- or NetWare-based servers as well.
  
• How Xserve RAID works, in a nutshell
  Each 7200-rpm hard drive connects to a dedicated Ultra ATA drive channel to eliminate bottlenecks and maximize the 400MB/s Fibre Channel host connection. This in turn means that as you add drives, Xserve RAID scales in both capacity and performance. And with an industry-standard 42U rack holding 147 terabytes of storage, you can keep adding drives for virtually unlimited storage.
  
• Failure Is Not an Option
  Digital video footage, large databases, media-rich documents, hi-res images, uncompressed audio and scientific data sets have one thing in common: terabyte-sized storage needs. And while trying to keep up with the demand for more and more storage space is a job in itself, you can’t lose sight of the need to protect your digital content against all contingencies — and still make that combination available to users ’round the clock.
  
• Fast access to your digital assets
  Instead of following the ruinously expensive — and easily avoidable — industry practice of relying on Fibre Channel hard drives, Apple did something truly innovative. It designed and developed a high-performance Ultra ATA-to-Fibre Channel systems architecture that delivers superior performance and reliability at a much lower cost.
  
  Xserve RAID is designed for nonstop operation, with uninterrupted access to your critical data. Redundant hot-swappable power supplies and cooling modules enable the system to keep running even if one module were to fail. All active components are modular and designed to be switched in and out of place in seconds — without tools and without interruption of service.
  
• You control the controllers
  Each Xserve RAID controller uses an environment management coprocessor to monitor and manage the RAID set and enclosure conditions. Naturally, you control the controllers, instead of the other way around. The RAID Admin utility uses the environment management coprocessor to build multiple RAID sets on the fly, enabling you to bring storage online instantly — with no waiting for initialization. And since the RAID Admin utility is written entirely in Java, you can monitor and manage your RAID storage from anywhere on the Internet.
  
• Practice management by walking around
  Onsite management is even easier. Fact is, if you’re the kind of IT professional who likes to keep tabs on what’s going on in your domain by actually walking around and checking things out for yourself, you’ll love the way Xserve RAID provides continuous visual feedback on system status. Indicator lights on the front panel display status at a glance for power cooling, RAID controllers and enclosure lock, while LEDs on each Apple Drive Module signal drive activity. With 46 blue LEDs down the middle displaying activity levels for each host channel, and Fibre Channel indicators showing link status, you can verify a system’s health just by looking at it.

• Doesn’t stop while you swap
  Xserve RAID drives feature true hot-swapping capabilities that allow you to remove and replace a failed drive without losing data or interrupting service, thanks to the hardware RAID controller and the Apple-designed drive carrier. With Xserve RAID, the system continues to operate while the contents of the failed drive are rebuilt on a replacement drive, using redundant or parity information.

• SMART data
  Xserve RAID hardware and remote management software work together to provide industry-leading remote monitoring and alerting capabilities. The RAID controller automatically reads Self-Monitoring, Analysis, Reporting Technology (SMART) data from each hard drive. SMART data lets you take preemptive measures. It allows the drive to report its health, and enables the operating system to warn you of a pre-failure condition — and gives you an opportunity to replace the hard drive before a failure occurs. The goal? Uptime, all the time