Xsan () is

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

's storage area network (SAN) or clustered file system for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

. Xsan enables multiple Mac desktop and

Xserve Xserve is a line of rack unit computers designed by Apple Inc. for use as servers. Introduced in 2002, it was Apple's first designated server hardware design since the Apple Network Server in 1996. In the meantime, ordinary Power Macintosh G ...

systems to access shared

block storage In computing (specifically data transmission and data storage), a block, sometimes called a physical record, is a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a maximum length; a ''block size''. Data t ...

over a

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data c ...

network. With the Xsan file system installed, these computers can read and write to the same storage volume at the same time. Xsan is a complete SAN solution that includes the

metadata controller Metadata controller (or MDC) is a storage area network (SAN) technology for managing file locking, space allocation and data access authorization. This is needed when several clients are given block level access to the same disk volume, data stora ...

software, the file system client software, and integrated setup, management and monitoring tools. Xsan has all the normal features to be expected in an enterprise shared disk file system, including support for large files and file systems, multiple mounted file systems, metadata controller failover for fault tolerance, and support for multiple operating systems.

Interoperability

Xsan is based on the

StorNext File System StorNext File System (SNFS), colloquially referred to as StorNext is a shared disk file system made by Quantum Corporation. StorNext enables multiple Windows, Linux and Apple workstations to access shared block storage over a Fibre Channel networ ...

made by

Quantum Corporation Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides