Products
Advanced RAID Management
The Apple Xserve RAID® set the high-water mark for storage management on Mac OS X. Other RAID systems with clunky windows explorer-like browser based interfaces, difficult to use command line interfaces and even cryptic LCD displays just seemed antiquated and out of place, and more importantly not particularly Apple-friendly to us. We knew we could do better.
We asked a number of Apple users what would be the best storage management approach for them; the answer was unanimous “a Cocoa management application”. We got the message loud and clear and began developing a native application suite for Mac OS X, and we are happy to say it’s here now. Setup, management, and monitoring. A perfect compliment to the performance, redundancy, and features of the XRAID. We feel it’s absolutely the best way to manage external storage on Mac OS X.
We started out by breaking up the common grouping of administrative and monitoring functions in a single tool. User studies told us that the grouping of admin and monitoring was easier for the programmers, but was highly limiting in ease of use as RAID systems became more complex with features such as active/active redundancy and secondary expansion systems.
Most admin tasks are done in initial setup, or when updating or changing configurations which is infrequent. Where as, the monitoring is often daily.
The complexity of displaying the “heavy lifting” management tasks alongside the “light-weight” daily monitoring views, overly complicated the application. In a number of cases having joint management and monitoring – even with separate passwords opened up the user up to making a catastrophic mistake such as deleting all their data. Lets face it, you are not likely to “Admin” your storage daily if you have chosen a reliable well performing product.
We found that by the separating out the setup and admin functions, we could make the Admin process more automated and guided, making the task much less laborious than found with other systems. We felt this was a much better approach for tasks that are so infrequent.
Active Admin
The Active Admin features a guided Setup making setting up your first or fiftieth XRAID easy.
Because Active Admin is Mac OS X native, you won’t have to deal with browser based application limitations and non Apple-like interfaces. To make setup even easier, we added Bonjour discovery. The guided setup gets you up and running in minutes, and allows changes to made on-the-fly without memorization of difficult commands or referring to long manuals.
Active Admin is not only easy to use, it’s easy to get started with. Management is performed “out-of-band” over Ethernet. And because we built in Bonjour, you won’t have to memorize IP addresses or use serial ports to initially talk to your RAID. If your Mac is on the network, you are ready to Admin your Active Storage XRAID. Choosing the best-optimized configuration for your application is automatic, as are software updates and non-disruptive Firmware updates. Active Admin is as powerful as it is easy.
Management of the Active Storage XRAID™ is further simplified by the modern design of the RAID controller and the RAID Kernel. Many of the tasks required to setup and maintain earlier systems are just not required.
Active Viewer
By breaking out the daily monitoring tasks from the Admin functions, we were able to develop a fast “light-weight” Native Mac OS X viewer providing an at-a-glance view of one or dozens of Active Storage XRAID™ systems. With a simple intuitive interface, there is no learning curve to deal with. And because it’s a viewer only, you can’t make a mistake and damage your configuration or destroy your data inadvertently.
Active viewer like Active Admin utilizes the power of Bonjour to make discovery and monitoring of XRAID systems easy. The intuitive interface lets you navigate quickly and drill-down into the Active Storage XRAID. The viewer’s remote capabilities let you monitor systems anywhere in the world as easily as you can monitor in the same room.
XRAID Widget
Many current Apple storage users we spoke with wanted an even simpler way to monitor their storage on a daily basis, and with the help of Mac OS X Leopard ® we were able to deliver it. We developed a simple yet highly effective Dashboard Widget.
The Active Storage XRAID™ widget provides an at-a-glance view of your system and utilizes the Growl™ notification system to keep you informed of warnings or failures in real-time. Clicking on a warning or failure opens the Active Viewer automatically allowing you a finer grain view of the event.
iPhone
With the native management suite complete, we knew we could even more. Apple provided us the greatest application platform since Mac OS X, of course we are talking about the incredible iPhone®. The iPhone presented us with the perfect canvas to reinvent storage management; we call it “Storage Remote Control”. Monitoring your storage remotely was never more convenient or powerful.
NOTE: Screenshot content may differ from those shown depending on the product and product configuration.
