The Swinburne University of Technology’s Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing in Australia has implemented Apple Xserve RAID storage systems for use with its 130-node Dell cluster. “We looked at upgrading the supercomputer but that would have been too expensive for what we needed,” the center’s director, Professor Matthew Bailes, told LinuxWorld. “Although we don’t have much to do with Apple, after seeing its new Xserve RAID storage device we decided to evaluate it… The Xserve RAID is the cheapest system of its type and none of the other mainstream players have a comparable price. Also, at around 100Mbps read and write to disk, it is faster than our SCSI system which has an I/O of 50Mbps.” The center purchased six Xserve RAID systems with a combined storage capacity of 13.2TB for “around AUD$100,000 including education and volume discounts.”