Hi, me again, asking about software LOL :D


/sighs....I am very new to Mac, as of about 2 months ago but I had a client give me some software, all still packaged, shrinkwrapped, etc but the thing is, I havent a clue what half of it does.

I did ask here about some other software, Apple Remote Deskop and got some very good help but i have one more that i am stumped on.

In all fairness, he did give me some software I have opened and kept but some of it, I cant imagine i would ever use.

The latest is one called Xsan 2 v.2.2

I have been to the website for Apple and after dealing with the shock of the price tag of $1099.00 for this software, I have read it but I am not good enough with computers to really understand what it does

Can someone please explain this to me as simply as possible?

Here is the URL for it:

Xsan 2.2 - Apple Store (Canada) (http://store.apple.com/ca/product/MC186Z/A?mco=MTQ2NzA0NjQ)




TIA

I'm going to go on the assumption you're not familiar with what a SAN (Storage Area Network) is to start off and then go from there and give a quick and dirty introduction.

The quick and dirty; Xsan is a program for Mac OS X that acts as the traffic cop allowing or disallowing other computers to access files available on the SAN.

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Storage Area Networks

A storage area network can be summarized as a network devoted to access to storage - usually terabytes worth and often as speeds faster than a regular hard drive installed on the computer. SANs are most often seen in the datacentres of video production houses, large corporations, or anywhere that a very large amount of disk space needs to be shared amongst several computers or servers often at high speed.

You may have heard of other acronyms such as NAS (Network Attached Storage) - it's very similar but instead of having it's own dedicated network (like a SAN) it uses your current network (which you use to access the web, transfer files, etc.) to connect to your computer.

The actual network for the storage in a SAN can vary as there are some that run over a standard Ethernet network (EditShare for example) or others will use Fibre Channel (Xsan, FibreJet, among many others).

Xsan

Xsan differs from many other SAN solutions as the actual SAN contents are the only thing being transferred back and forth via the Fibre Channel. It uses a second more common ethernet network to talk to the metadata controller (the server that has Xsan installed on it - think of it as a traffic cop). This second network is supposed to be separate from your more regular network to keep the latency and bandwidth as high as possible.

Perfect!!!!

Thank you very much for your great explanation.
I was able to determine it was most likely software used in large video houses.....although I cant recall what it was I saw that gave me that idea.


Your explanation was very clear and I now understand perfectly what this is used for.
Sure wish i had your knowledge!!!


Cant figure out why for the life of me I would be given such useless software, at least useless for myself....but thats neither here nor there. I really just wanted to know what it would be used for.