My name's Jason Thorpe. I'm the Xsan Engineering Manager at Apple and I'd like that thank you all for coming. I know that after such a great party it's kind of hard to come in for a Friday morning session, but thanks to all for being here. I'm here to talk to you about Xsan 2.

All right. So first of all, let's get just a show of hands. How many people are sort of old salty Xsan dogs? You've been around the block, you know you run it, you think it's great, you use it today. Okay good.

How many of on you are kind of on the cusp of becoming Xsan users? You know you need a SAN and you're getting ready to deploy one? How many of you are here because you heard about it at the Podcast Producer sessions? Anybody? A few? Okay good.

So for those of you who are new to Xsan, let's kind of talk a little bit about what it is. It's a shared file system. It's ideal for sharing sharing file content in a high performance way for video editing, for servers, for high performance computing. Kind of anything that needs high performance access to shared storage.

So what does that mean? Well, let's kind of take a look at what a traditional file server looks like. So traditional file sharing environment, we have some storage there at the top. It's connected to that file server using fibre channel. Nice big fat pipe between the server and the storage. But those clients down there, which are trying very hard to run Final Cut Pro, are attempting to get to that storage over gigabit Ethernet and it's all going through one server.

So gigabit Ethernet is half the performance of even just one fibre channel port and chances are that server's connected with both. So what's going to happen is, you might be able to sustain, you know, a couple of streams of video, but more than likely, you're going to have a couple of clients drop frames.

That's not what you want. That makes your whole day bad. So if we take a look at Xsan. So in Xsan, all the clients are directly attached to the storage. They all have a nice big fat pipe to the RAID. We have something that's very similar to a server.

We call it Xsan Controller. It kind of hangs off to the side. It's connected to the storage as well. And it is in charge of dealing with all of the metadata associated with the file systems; so, you know, the file names, their owners, their creation dates, all those things. But it is not actually involved in the transfer of the data.

So another nice property of Xsan is that the performance scales when you add storage. So in this case, you know, we might have a work load that requires more bandwidth than just one RAID can provide. So we add another RAID and the pipes get fatter. And again, you know, we can keep scaling that up. You know, add another couple of RAIDS and the pipes get fatter again.

Another nice property about Xsan is that you can add a redundant controller to provide failover capability. So if you look at the our first file server slide, there is one server and that's it. I mean that one server can be connected to that one set of storage. And if that server goes down, then all those clients are out of luck. In Xsan, you can have a redundant controller, we call it a standby controller. So if the primary controller were to fail for whatever reason, the stand by controller just takes over transparently and the clients can still access the data.

So we've been using, you know, some Final Cut workstations in these example slides here, but Xsan is more than just a platform for running video applications on. It's a great platform for deploying scaleable and highly available server services and it just so happens that Mac OS X server with Leopard comes with three of them right out of the box. First one is a mail server cluster.

Yeah mail server cluster. The second is an iCal server cluster. How many have been are interested in deploying this? ( Applause ) >> Jason Thorpe: This is pretty cool stuff. And finally, Podcast Producer. And let's who thought the Podcast Producer demos were just phenomenal this week?

So Xsan is a key enabling technology for Podcast Producer. We're going to like, you know, see all of that in a diagram here in just a second. So let's just take a look at what an example mail cluster configuration might look like. There in the middle you have sort of your cloud of mail servers. They're all connected to a shared back end set of storage.

And then you kind of have your clients over there on the left. So in between the clients and the cloud is a load balancer that enables your mail clients to connect to this, you know, mail dot example dot com, instead of having to know that there are forks servers there. The load balancer spreads out the load across all of those servers.

If one of those servers were to go down, the load balancer knows to redirect the connection to another client. The mail client will retry and it still can get to all their data. So we're going to wave your magic wand here and see that an iCal server cluster is very similar. Not a lot of magic here. This is all just set up in server admin to make all this work.

And then if we take a look at a Podcast Producer cluster, it's a little different. So in Podcast Producer, you have a set of machines that are uploading content over the network to the Podcast Producer server. The Podcast Producer server is then going to place that data on the shared storage and then the sort of work flow engines, the XRAID agents are then going to process that data that's on the shared storage. When it's done processing it, it's going to post it to, for example in this example slide we have just a web server posting to RSS feed. The web server can pull that directly off the SAN. You don't have to copy it. Slide. There we go.

All right. So let's talk a little bit just about the history of Xsan. So we released the first version of Xsan back in January of 2005. It supported Panther. There were a couple of updates along the way. First really major update that we had was in June of that year when we released Xsan 1.1 supported Tiger and gained support for volumes larger than 16 terabyte.

Another software updater 2. In April of 2006 we released an update that supported RAID sets that were larger than two terabytes. We kind of corresponded to a size bump on the RAID. And then the next really big update was in August of 2006 we released Xsan 1.4. It was time to come out with the new MacPro systems. It was universal binary and also supported access control lists.

And then here's what you're all here to learn about today, Xsan 2.0 which is going to be available later this year. So let's talk about it. What's new in Xsan 2? So the first thing that's new in Xsan 2 is a new Xsan application completely rewritten from scratch.

Yeah. There's a couple of people very happy about that I'm sure. The most important thing to know about the new admin app is it's been designed to streamline all of your set up and administration tasks. So there's not a lot of hopping around between panes anymore. It's very task oriented.

And we have assistants to guide you through those things that are complex. So for example, in the old admin application you have to know that, all right, to expand a volume I have to unmount my clients and I have to stop the volume and I have to drag some things into a storage folder. You don't have to do that anymore.

We have assistants that walk you through all of these multistep tasks to make it really simple and much less error prone. There's a streamlined presentation of all the data and a streamlined work flow. We've kind of gone for consistency of gesturing across the application so that, you know, every task that you have to do will feel very familiar.

And it's asset oriented. So this enables you to really find the things you're interested about very quickly. There's a set of assets along the left side of the application window. You can find the thing you're looking for. We have some filters built in to those assets that are kind of similar to smart play lists in iTunes that allow you to drill down and find the information that you want really quickly.

And finally, I think this is going to be really interesting for small shops, perhaps boutique video editing places where you don't have a big network infrastructure, but you want to leverage all the things that Xsan has. Including, for example, access control lists. That requires Open Directory. Well, Xsan Admin can now optionally manage your user's groups and network settings without you having to hop around to different apps and know how to set all these things up. And we actually have in integration with the server set up assistants.

So there's going to be some really nice out of box experience for, you know, just bringing your whole stuff out of unpack it, connect the cables, power it up, and then very quickly you can have a running SAN. So we don't have any screen shots of this because it doesn't really do it justice. I actually am going to ask Jason Townsend, who is our lead Xsan Admin Engineer to come up and give us a quick demo.

So can we please go to the server projector please?

All right. Can everybody hear me? All right. Let's see. So I wanted to show you a little bit about the new Xsan Admin. As you heard just a moment ago, we've got a new navigation style. So on the left hand side we have the various assets like, volumes, LUNs, and computers. And then similar to using iTunes or other apps like that, you just pick which asset you're interested in and then you get a list of what applies to that and you can do various commands on it.

So I'd like to first show you the we've also another part of the navigation that's different, we've moved graphs and logs into their own windows so, for logs you just bring up a logs window and you can see on whichever computer you're interested in, the log that you want to see. You can filter it. It's probably familiar to anyone who's used any of our other server tools how that works.

And we also have a graphs window. We have a lot of graphs so you can see CPU network traffic, fibre traffic, memory usage, and you can look at different time scales. You can see us doing some set up stuff around this time probably. And again, you can look at whichever computer you're interested in with that.

Now I'd like to look at the Quotas pane and we've got some data on our SAN. And you can quickly see what different users are using, how they're in relation to their quota. You'll notice these little tick marks here indicate where the soft quota is. We now have separate control for hard and soft quota. So you can let someone temporarily go over their soft quota, but they'll still be able to add files up to their hard quota within a certain time limit.

And we can also filter. This applies across the whole app. So if I wanted to look for, you know, the French group for example, I could filter it that way. If there was a lot more here, it would probably be more compelling there; but anyway, just imagine there's a whole screen full of quotas here. And also we have filters here where we can look at just servers or just groups or who's over their soft quota or who's reached their hard quota. So if you know that that there's some kind of problem, you can focus in on what you're actually interested in.

All right. Now let's take a look at the computers pane. We can see the computers we've got here. And another feature I want to show you, that, again, applies to the whole app, we have what's called the Inspector. And that will show you more information about whatever you have selected. So you can see what software's installed, you can see the network interfaces and how they're configured, and, you know, a lot of information there. See what the license is. Now I'd like to just add a computer to the SAN.

And that's pretty simple. I just click this plus button here and there's a lot of machines on the rack that I could add, but I just want to add that first one. And we have the option of either entering the same name and password for everything or doing it one by one. In this case it's basically the same either way.

And oh, I guess I need to add a license for this. Let's see. I have this file here. Okay. There we go. So yeah. There's the one Jason sent me. I guess I could just let's see. I guess I could add a license and maybe retype that. Well that's kind of crappy. Maybe I'll just maybe I'll just copy it. Does that work? Oh cool. Okay.

Okay. So there's a license and then I'll go ahead and add that. And right now it's setting the license, setting up the config files and there's a computer add to the SAN. That was pretty easy. But one other thing I want to show you, just looking at how we deal with licenses. Those are managed as an asset just like everything else on your SAN. So it doesn't like the ones we have here, they're all assigned to computers.

But if I wanted, I could add some more licenses that are just part of the SAN. And they're not assigned to anything yet, but when I add computers later they'll go ahead and automatically assign as those computers get added. I think I had another file somewhere. Oh, here we go.

There's some more some more serial numbers. All right cool. So let's see. How am I going to do this? Okay, well I guess I could add one and then copy and paste, but actually I don't think I want to do that. That's gotta be a better way of doing that. Maybe I can just drag this file in. Oh, there we go. Okay.

All right. So now I've got some extra licenses available for when I add more computers later and I don't have to worry about individually assigning those licenses to each computer anymore like we used to. All right. Thanks. Can we go back to the slides please?

All right thanks Jason. So the thing to take away from this is we've put a lot of effort into making that Admin app sort of more streamlined, easier to use, and we definitely encourage your feedback on that. So we'll keep that in mind for later on in this presentation.

So next we have some improved performance. So one of the things that Xsan is really, you know, good at is, you know, streaming data from storage to a workstation, like a Final Cut workstation. We've actually made some performance improvements in this area and are planning on doing more before we ship it.

But most interesting is that we've actually added pretuned volume workload settings. So one of the things that may or may not be obvious to people in the room is that if you have a volume that's been tuned to stream big video files, it might not be so great for hosting home directories. There's kind of two different ends of the continuum. Big files that are read sequentially versus small files that are accessed completely randomly. You need to set the volume up differently to work optimally for those two types of configurations.

In the old Admin app you had to know a lot of magic to make this happen and we've kind of made that a little simpler. We've we're providing some sort of presets that will allow you to select kind of at a high level what kind of workload you're going to use that volume for. It'll pretune a bunch of settings, both on the controller side and on the client side. And this is actually there's a plug in architecture here.

If you, for example, are a shop that deploys a lot of Xsan volumes and you know you're going to be adding more, it's going to be possible for you to add your configurations. It's just going to be a P list to the application itself and have it appear in that pop up menu.

So we also have a new data layout for streaming workloads. We're going to talk about that just a bit more here in a second with a little diagram. But we think that this is going to be really good for folks that are making the transition to uncompressed high def video, want to work with that and kind of like this online format. We've heard some anecdotal reports of kind of like a ceiling. When you get to a certain number of streams, like you kind of get stuck. We're making some changes in the way we actually lay out the data that are designed to address that.

And finally we have some more advanced settings for even finer finer control for you guys to fine tune your volumes. You're not going to have to edit config files manually based on what a kbase article says anymore. You're going to have some things that are right there in the application. So if you know that you have, you know, a folder that's going to have a hundred thousand items in it or more, it's going to be possible for you to tune up some settings to make that work a little better.

So let's take a look at what the new data layout looks like. First let's look at what the old one looks like, the kind of standard one that we use today. And this still exists in the Xsan 2 software. So we have two movie clips here. They're both uncompressed high def movie clips that require a lot of throughput.

Each of them requires, you know, two full Xserve RAID's worth of bandwidth. So we have a storage pool here that's going to hold our video. And we have that storage pool has an affinity assigned to it so when people are storing their video files in this their video folder, it's getting steered to this storage pool.

So when we write the first movie, it's going to get spread across all of those RAIDS. When we write the second movie, it's also going to get spread across all those RAIDS. So the problem here is that if you're accessing those two video streams independently, you're going to have contention. Those RAIDS are going to be doing a lot of work. The discs inside are actually going to be seeking back and forth a lot. And if you push this too far, you may drop frames.

So what we've done is the new streaming data layout that is going to be enabled when you select the appropriate volume configuration when you set up your volume is we actually split that up into multiple storage pools. But your users might be used to having one folder that has an affinity for video to put their content in. They don't want to have to know that they have to put it in different folders. What we've done is decoupled storage pools from affinities, and now affinities can encompass multiple storage pools.

So now the user can drag, you know, a movie file into their video folder and the first one's going to get written to the video one storage pool. The second one's going to get written to the video two storage pool. They're both going to have the bandwidth they need and they're not going to have contention for each other's drives because we round robin those files across those storage pools.

So the third big new thing that we have in Xsan 2 is something we call MultiSAN, and what this allows you to do is provision your Xsan controllers. So I have a diagram coming because this is maybe a little hard to grasp just from the text here. But what this really allows you to do is isolate your mission critical volumes away from one another.

So if you have something that's really important, like a playout volume, you don't want trouble on another volume interfering with that playout. This allows you to do that while still having global visibility. So it allows you to have one machine connected to sort of both SAN islands to move the data back and forth. So let's take a look at a diagram here.

So over on the left we have a post production volume with some Final Cut Pro workstations and they have their Xsan controllers. Then over on the right we have a playout volume. And there's a playout server that's playing out to air and it's pulling its data directly from its volume with its own dedicated controllers.

In between there we actually have a data mover. This is optional. I wanted to point this out because I think there's a developer opportunity here for a for a playout server that can watch, for example a folder in the production volume and do a rate limited copy up to the playout volume. Using Finder to copy that data you're going to really pound those discs to try to copy data fast. So I think there's a developer opportunity here in that data mover piece.

But as you can see here we've got these two sets of control lists provisioned away. So how many of you run multiple volumes and you have like a pool of like four controllers if you in your SAN deployments? Let me see a show of hands. A few people here.

Okay. So you may have noticed that when you bring up the SAN you might have all four volumes being hosted on one controller, right? If you observe that behavior before? MultiSAN allows you to sort of fix that problem. You can say, well these two controllers are only involved with this volume.

These two controllers are only involved with this volume. So if you have a failure of a controller on, say, the production volume, neither one of the playout controllers is going to attempt to take control of that volume. They're completely isolated, but there's still completely global visibility. So everything can see everything else.

Finally, Xsan 2 supports Spotlight. ( Applause ) >> Jason Thorpe: Yeah. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Spotlight, Spotlight is the searching facility that's built into Mac OS X. It allows you to find files based on their content or any part of their metadata. So Xsan is actually fully integrated into the Spotlight search experience. It works just like a local volume and, you know, just what users expect. And it supports all the standard Spotlight API's. So if you, as a developer, are integrating Spotlight support into your applications, you're going to get Xsan search and support for free.

And finally this does require Mac OS X Leopard. So it does not work with Tiger. Tiger clients will work in a SAN environment like this. The content will still get indexed, but Tiger will not be able to search. So I'd like to bring Bill Studenmund, who's one of the Xsan file system engineers who actually did a lot on the Spotlight support in Xsan 2 to give us just a quick demo.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Excellent. All right. As Jason mentioned, my name's Bill Studenmund and I've been the engineer that's worked most on the Spotlight in Xsan component. And in order to demonstrate Spotlight for you today I was going to take the role of a content creator. Spotlight is really great for what it lets you do.

And so in this demo I'll be part of a group. I have Alice and Bob as my co workers. And we create various forms of content. We have images, movies, documents, and our collaboration is a lot easier with Xsan. We have one volume; all of our files are there. If we're one of us is done with a part of a project, wants to hand it off, it's just there for the next person. That's great.

The problem we've had is we have all of our content on our Xsan. That makes it kind of hard to actually find things when you're not working on them. We tried folders and then subfolders and subfolders and that's great if however it is you set those folders up is how you always want to find things. But if the reason you're looking for a file, the keyword is not one of the top folders, it can be like 20 questions.

With Spotlight it's a lot easier. We just keep our files in folders on the SAN and Spotlight will find whatever we need. We also really like Spotlight because it gives us very free form searches. We just pull up a search; we like it so much we've actually made some smart searches. We we just have a smart search for images, movies, documents; they're kind of boring.

We just we search for something and we see it there. With Quick Looks you can go in and make sure what you're looking at is the one that you want. We also we love Spotlight because also it's free form. Sometimes we got more than we wanted. Well sometimes, if you're looking for one thing, we think we know exactly what we want, we find something else and realize, oh, that's actually a better idea. So it can lead us in directions we hadn't thought we were going to go. So let me show you some searches. Hello? Oh there we go.

Okay. Oh. I'm seeing everything on the volume, including some of shell's files. All right. I just started a project on Yosemite. So let's see what we have. All right. It looks like I've got some images, really nice looking pictures, and it looks like I have a map. Well, that's a good starting point.

That can get me going. We can do other searches. Say you're looking for an image of someone surfing on the beach. Not someone surfing in the water, not someone putting the surf board in their car. If you click in the right okay. If you ah, I see what's wrong.

There you get the image. Exactly what I was looking for, and then it went away. You can also do other searches. I have a project I'm starting where I need some sunsets. So let's see what we have. All right. I have some images. That's a good start. But I was talking about this earlier and Alice said she has a sunset she's been working on. It's a Namibian beach. It's beautiful. She thinks it's just what I need, but I don't see it yet. We love Spotlight because the searches are dynamic. As any of us change content on the SAN, all of the searches can see this and update.

So Alice has been working on things and, oh, it looks like she just finished. And there is her beach that she was telling me about. I think that would really work for my project. Not only that, but like I was saying, with Spotlight you get more than you'd asked for. I've got some other ones that I can flip through and these aren't quite what I needed, but they can give me ideas. So that is Spotlight searching on Xsan. We really like it and we hope you will too. Thank you.

Okay, can we go back to the slides please? Thanks Bill.

You're welcome.

Okay. So those are the four big new things in Xsan 2. And at this time I'd actually like to bring up Bill Hudson who's the director of business and market development for ProApps at Apple, who's going to talk to us about how these new features can help the ProApps folks.

Thank you very much, Jason.

As many of you may know, we released Final Cut Studio 2 just this last couple of weeks, about three weeks ago. And it is a comprehensive suite of applications that include all of these products, Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Sound Track Pro 2, Color Compressor 3, and DVD Studio Pro 4. This is an entire suite of applications that address a lot of different disciplines. And when you have so many different disciplines in a particular suite, naturally you have a work group requirement.

And Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio works absolutely beautifully in a SAN environment where many different artists can work together to create projects. Well Final Cut Studio is incredibly popular with the individual users and the like. But on Xsan it absolutely sings. And I'm going to talk for a few minutes about some of the types of deployments that we see around the world with Final Cut Pro. But first let's take a look at who these customers are, well, and what they do.

They're independent productions. They make, maybe documentaries, they make feature films and the like. A lot of the independent films that would go at Sundance and the like, boutique post houses. Now boutique post houses and independent productions are the class of customer that typically is in a small work group of about three to five or six users.

This is, at times well, it's a majority of the Final Cut Pro user on Xsan falls into this category of about six or so. We have many, and I'm going to show you many that are much larger, but we find that a majority of our users are in that classification. And Xsan 2 is going to go a long way to helping these guys set up their systems and manage them. So we're very excited about that.

Television production, shows like Scrubs and others where, a lot of reality television as well, where there's a very quick turn around and you'll have work groups of anywhere from three and four people all the way up to very large facilities such as Bunim Murray Productions in Los Angeles which produces reality television.

Next, feature film. I talked about that. Typically small configurations of no more than about four or five editors on a single system. Broadcast created is a big market for Final Cut on Xsan. These are people who do on air promos and bumpers and station ID's and this type of thing. Very very popular on Xsan with Final Cut Studio.

Broadcast news is an environment where we are only really starting over the last few years to make in roads with Final Cut Studio and Xsan. Broadcast news is a very different requirement. We rely on a lot of third party companies such as Building for Media, Gallery, other companies like Grass Valley and others for integration in this category. And then there's broadcast production. So long form television shows and the like.

So let's look at an actual deployment. This is a schematic of NHK's production environment for the Olympics in Turino, Italy for the Winter Olympics about a year and a half ago. And they relied on Final Cut Studio and Xsan and a third party product from a small developer in the UK called Gallery. And Gallery has an application called PictureReady.

And PictureReady allows for live base band streams in this instance it's the ingest from satellite. HD streams that are coming in to PictureReady running on a Mac, ingesting through a Kona card to the DVC Pro HD codec. The beauty of PictureReady is that it allows editors on Xsan to instantly access and edit these files as they're coming in.

Now you can imagine in a live sporting event how important that is because you can't wait to for an event to finish before you can start editing. Well, the beauty of this is, of course you can be editing as it's coming in. They can online and do some color grading, edit this thing, and send it out right away. Extremely successful application and deployment. They used it at the World Cup as did a couple of other broadcasters.

Another high profile customer of ours around the world is CCTV, Central China Television in Beijing, China. And they were launching a television network that was an HD broadcast facility and they needed over 20 Final Cut Pro systems to be editing multiple shows simultaneously. And they turned to Xsan and Final Cut Studio. And at that time they really had an issue. They wanted to work in uncompressed HD to get the highest quality. But as Jason spoke of earlier, you have bandwidth issues.

High definition, HD, can range from 100 to about 150 megabytes per second per stream. And Final Cut Pro can allow you to edit multiple streams on a single station. So you can see that you do the math and you are not going to get 20 uncompressed streams here. They used the DVC Pro HD codec primarily in addition to uncompressed.

Well Final Cut Studio 2 has a new codec and that codec is called Apple Pro Res 422. The beauty of this codec is that it allows you to edit uncompressed quality at standard definition data rates. It's a full raster or a full frame rate codec. It's an eight or ten bit codec. It's a variable bit rate codec. And it allows you, as I said, to work in very high, extremely high quality HD as around 20 to 22 megabytes per second.

So an incredibly efficient codec and CCTV is incredibly excited about this. They will be able to move all of these stations to this codec for a higher quality output. Next, traveling the globe, we're now looking at Televisa. Televisa is the largest Latin American broadcaster and they have deployed a lot of Xsan in multiple facilities.

Here we're looking at a render pipeline using Compressor and Qmaster. Now they have over 50 Mac work stations in this particular facility and 10 work stations, and those are the 50 doing Final Cut editing, and then they have 10 work stations that are doing graphics in 3D using Maya and After Effects.

Now the beauty of this is facility in this installation is that we've got a rather large render farm of 12 servers and this render farm allows them to use Compressor for transcoding. It allows them to render Maya and After Effects projects using Qmaster so they can use this entire render farm for all of these purposes.

Now Televisa also has a lot of Discrete or Autodesk products for high end graphics and compositing using Flame and Flint work stations. And Xsan is compatible with the StorNext file system. And that allows them to connect these autodesk work stations to Xsan and allow Final Cut Pro to be a feeder into those work stations.

Those are incredibly expensive work stations that start at around $250,000 per work station. They didn't want to they did not want to scrap that investment, yet they needed to connect their editing stations into their existing facility. And because of the cross platform support of StorNext, they're able to do that very efficiently.

Now more locally here in the United States, we've got CNN in Washington, D.C. And they're using applications from Building for Media and their Fork products. And CNN has been on the air for nearly two years with this system. They do a number of shows from Washington, D.C. all on Xsan, all on Final Cut, using Building for Media. And it is incredibly successful solution. You'll notice that there are a number of iMacs and PowerBooks in this system.

And they've got a server that allows them to tie those systems in. They're working off line in Offline resolutions. But again, the Building for Media applications work very beautifully with Final Cut Pro and there's a great solution there. There are deployments all around the world with Building for Media running Xsan and Final Cut.

Now next, this is an interesting one. This is a facility that has been in the testing phase for a number of months in Asia. And they had a requirement of connecting two facilities, a production studio and a post facility, by fibre over 30 kilometers. And so they had some fibre relay switches in there, what they call a DWDM switch; it's basically a repeater. And they had two volumes in each facility. Well now, with MultiSan, you have the ability to deploy that in this type of environment.

If you lost that connection between those two SANs, both can work independently without a problem. Right? That link comes back up and they're communicating again. So in this instance here, if they lose that link, they've got a problem because they're both actually co dependant upon one another. So Xsan 2.0 is going to be fantastic in allowing for this type of environment to work very very efficiently.

And I think we've got one more. That's right. We if you were at the session a couple of days ago that J.D. Mankovksy gave, he talked a little bit about the Vicom VMirror. This is a very successful appliance that has been deployed in a number of important broadcasters here in the United States as well as others around the world. And it allows you to mirror your your Xsan entirely. So broadcast facilities, they absolutely need that redundancy. They need the protection. And also, quite honestly, you know, you never know what kind of disaster may happen. You may have power outages and things like that.

This allows a file that's being written to the SAN to be simultaneously written to two distinct SAN mirrors, right. So this is working today at a number of facilities NFL Network for one. The Korean Broadcasting broadcaster, National Korean Broadcaster, KBS, in Seoul, Korea is using this system very effectively. They've got 19 Final Cut Pro work stations and they are mirroring their SAN using the Vicom VMirror.

So these are just a couple of examples of a large deployments doing different types of things with very unique requirements and Xsan gives you that flexibility to customize your solution for your particular installation. Again, thank you very much and I'll hand it back to Jason.

Thank you.

Thanks Bill. Okay. So, we've gone pretty fast today, which is good. We're going to have a lot of time for questions and answers. So let's just summarize what we have here. So Xsan 2, just a recap. What is new in Xsan 2? We have an all new Xsan Admin, we have improved performance, we have MultiSAN, and we have Spotlight.

A developer preview is available today. Some of you may have already downloaded it earlier in the week. I actually encourage you to download it again. We found a problem with the original one that was posted. Download it again if you've already done so. You can get it from the Apple Developer Connection and it supports Tiger and Leopard.

For more information, first of all for general Xsan inquiries, feel free to send email to Xsan at Apple dot com. That will reach the appropriate folks who can get you more information if you're interested in purchasing Xsan. For anyone who's interested in participating in the Xsan seeding program for Xsan 2, I encourage you to contact Shayaan Siddiqui Shayaan, can you stand up and wave your arms. This person can help you if you're interested in being part of the seeding program.

And this will allow you to, you know, provide a lot of feedback on the product early on. And then finally for general information about Xsan support and other resources, you can always go to the Xsan web page as Apple dot com slash Xsan. And then I'd like to also take a minute to plug some of our Xsan user communities.

We run a mailing list at Apple called the Xsan Users Mailing List. You can just go to lists at Apple dot com at your web browser and, you know, browse that, search that, and sign up for it. And then also we have an integrator that actually runs a community site calls Xsanity. There's a lot of useful tips and tricks there. Please, I encourage y'all to, you know, take a look at that. There's always lots of good info there.