Although xRAID has been discontinued by Apple, enterprise infrastructure will continue to support the once popular storage solution for many years to come.  RAID Admin is a Mac OS X Server application used to administer and control xRAID.  The user interface was designed to easily navigate between specific set of operations.  In this article, I’m going to highlight the key operations of RAID Admin and show you how easily and quickly RAID can be configured for your environment.

Monitor the status of arrays, drives, components, fibre channels, network, and events/ logs.  The xServe on the example above has 2 arrays with RAID 5 configuration.  The first drive on second array is designated as a spare.  If one of the drive fails, the distributed parity in RAID 5 configuration will automatically be written to the spare drive.

To create an array, choose a RAID Level and select drives to be included in the array.  For additional information on RAID Level, please refer to Article #30 What is RAID?

To delete array, select the array.  Deleting array will result to data loss.  Take extreme caution when deleting an array.

Configure network addressing, fibre channel, and performance for RAID controllers in Settings.

Following operations are available in Utilities.  If array integrity verification detects problem, use the rebuild function to rebuild the parity data.

Slice or expand an existing array to manage storage capacity within Advanced option.

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