Mac OS X Server

Server admins file sharing dialogue window

File system. Optimised for your data.

Mac OS X Server includes file system support designed and optimised for business-critical server deployments. This includes support for installation on the Mac OS Extended file system (HFS+) with optional case sensitivity, as well as data access from UNIX File System (UFS) and other volumes.

64bit allocation

Efficiency to the max.

Apple’s Mac OS Extended file system supports 64-bit disk space addressing and features 32-bit file allocation blocks — maximizing disk efficiency by decreasing the disk space usage on large volumes and volumes containing a large number of files. In addition, support for the Berkeley FFS-based UFS and standard POSIX semantics enables Mac OS X Server to access and host data from traditional UNIX file systems.

Long filenames and international support.

Mac OS X Server allows more descriptive filenames, with support for up to 255 characters and Unicode text encoding for international and mixed-script filenames.

Case sensitivity.

Mac OS X Server offers an optional case-sensitive file system format for HFS+, allowing administrators to safely host files for use by UNIX applications that require case sensitivity.

File system journaling.

A robust journaling feature protects the integrity of the file system in the event of an unplanned shutdown or power failure. With journaling in Mac OS X Server, the server automatically tracks file system operations and maintains a continuous record of these transactions in a separate file, called a journal. After an unexpected shutdown, the operating system can use the journal to return the file system to a known state — eliminating the need to perform a consistency check on the entire file system during startup. With a journaled file system, bringing a volume back online takes just seconds, regardless of the number of files or the size of the volume.

RAID

Software RAID.

Mac OS X Server supports drive striping (RAID 0) for improved performance, drive mirroring (RAID 1) for improved reliability and mirrored striping (RAID 10) for improving both performance and reliability of server storage. In addition, Mac OS X Server allows you to reformat storage in the background: You can promote a single volume to a mirrored volume, split a mirrored array into two volumes (demotion) or rebuild RAID volumes — without server downtime.