Apple delays Xserve storage unit

Apple Computer has delayed until early next year the launch of its first rack-mounted storage product.

The Xserve RAID, which Apple had promised to deliver by the end of this year, will not make the deadline, according to a posting on Apple's Web site.

"We've received an overwhelming thumbs-up on our Xserve 1U rack-mount server from customers and reviewers since it started shipping in July, and now we're working hard to deliver Xserve's companion RAID product in early 2003, not by the end of calendar 2002 as originally announced," the company said.

An Apple representative would not say why the Mac maker is delaying the product.

When it unveiled the Xserve server in May, Apple previewed the Xserve RAID, which it said would follow by the end of the year.

Apple said the disk array would be housed in a 5.25-inch thick cabinet that would be capable of housing 14 hard drives for a total capacity of 1.68 terabytes. The system has two 2-gigabit-per-second Fibre Channel connections, a high-speed connection technology for communicating with servers.