This morning, Active Storage unveiled the ActiveSAN, a 1U, rack-mountable unit that some were hoping would be a viable alternative to the now-discountinued Xserve.
Sadly, I’m not sure this is it. While the ActiveSAN is Xsan compatible, and runs on Intel silicon, the software is Linux based. And while Linux servers keep the world turning and satellites in orbit, Mac OS X Server users probably won’t be switching to Linux just to gain a rack-mountable solution.
Xsan is cool. It really is. But the number of customers using Xsan is far outweighed by the number of customers using the other things the Xserve can do — AFP, mail, web and more. While I’m sure the Xsan crowd is excited this morning, the rest of us are a little … underwhelmed.
