Project X FAQ

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Project X: FAQ

What was this equipment used for?

This Apple-based complete turn-key solution provided video compression, rendering, recording, dubbing, capturing, and the like. It has sufficient bandwidth for most High Definition Video (HD/HDTV) work. All of the individual components used in this complete turn-key solution were chosen specifically because they are all on the Apple-approved compatibility and supported lists. For example, for a period of time this rack of gear was used for capturing video streams, and then compressing those large files for DVD format, using Apple’s Compressor utility. With Apple’s latest version of Compressor (included with Apple Final Cut Studio), which is distributed-processing cluster capable, the MPEG compression jobs were cut to a fraction of their original time by SIMULTANEOUSLY spooling all data to the shared Apple XSan fibre channel network, and processing jobs using all available computers in the cluster all at once.

How does Apple’s fibre channel solution share a single storage device?

Apple’s fibre channel file system solution is called Xsan, which installs transparently into their elegant yet powerful UNIX-based OS X 10.4 interface. This software allows you to connect many systems to one Xserve RAID through a fibre channel switch, to form a high performance Storage Area Network (SAN). The SAN allows all the systems connected to the fault-tolerant RAID to share the files on the RAID as if they were on the system's local disk. And since the RAID is connected by fibre channel to all the systems in the Xsan network, shared performance is far greater than a local disk.

What else can I do with it?

Features of the Apple Xserve/Xserve RAID/Xsan “supercomputer” solution make it ideal for:

	Clustered Computing. Use Apple’s cluster-aware distributed-processing software to get jobs done fast!
	Data Consolidation. Increases efficiency and scalability of your storage resources by aggregating storage pools and eliminates the need for storage provisioning.
	File-level Locking. Lets multiple Xserves connect to shared volume for improved performance and scalability.
	Direct Fibre Channel Connectivity. Reduces load on local area network or cluster interconnect technology, providing fast access to storage without bottlenecks.
	Metadata Controller Failover. Maximizes availability to ensure SAN operation in the event of a metadata controller failure.
	Flexible Volume Management. Makes it easy to scale SAN volumes by adding storage pools as capacity needs grow.

Read more about the Apple cluster solutions:
http://www.apple.com/xsan/highperformancecomputing.html