STA

Excerpted from IDC Document #201478, "Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2006-2010 Forecast: Record-breaking Years Lie Ahead."

Author: Dave Reinsel, Director Storage Hardware Research

The Industry in Aggregate

Calendar-year 2005 was a record-breaking year for the HDD industry from two perspectives: units and revenue. Surpassing the 2004 unit shipment record is no surprise, though the 24.4% increase to nearly 381 million drives surpassed all expectations. However, breaking the industry's old revenue record has received little attention. In 1997, the industry generated $27.8 billion in revenue. 2005 revenue came in at $27.9 billion, when rounded. It was close, but a record-breaker, nonetheless. This dynamic should not be overlooked given the difficult years the industry experienced immediately following 1997. Many question whether the same trend can happen again, but IDC sees the future in a positive light.

The component constraints that emerged late in 2004 lasted throughout all of 2005, especially with respect to glass and aluminum substrates. The limited supply of components coupled with manufacturing constraints among the HDD vendors created an environment of undersupply, moderate price declines, and unprecedented revenue growth.

Author: Sam Barnett, Product Line Manager, Serial Attached SCSI
and Serial ATA Storage & Storage Networking Products, Storage Products Division,
Vitesse Semiconductor

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) offers a wealth of benefits to the enterprise server and enclosure customer (high reliability and performance, mixed enterprise/desktop drive support, improved economies of scale), and key to scalability and performance is the expander.

This article offers a brief technical exploration of SAS expander technology and its potential evolution into the "interconnect-fabric" of choice for midrange and enterprise storage systems of tomorrow.

The author assumes the reader has some knowledge of point-to-point storage architectures and SAS nomenclature. Detailed specification information on SAS can be found on the T10 website under http://www.t10.org/ (click "Drafts" then "Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)" under "Protocols and Physical Layers"). Similarly, the SCSI Trade Association (STA) also offers a robust set of tutorials on SAS. The reader may reference this material at http://www.scsita.org.

Author: Bill Schilling, Marketing Director/Enterprise Segment and Kent Bransford, Sr. Technical Editor
Seagate Technology

After months of speculation and anticipation, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage solutions are now entering the marketplace in force. Given its unparalleled blend of performance, scalability and flexibility, it should come as no surprise that SAS is quickly making converts among IT professionals throughout the enterprise.

Yet some storage managers have been hesitant to adopt SAS, wary of the connection challenges this powerful new serial interface might entail. Having invested years of sweat equity to master the idiosyncrasies of parallel SCSI, they are understandably reluctant to risk a similarly steep learning curve with SAS.

Happily, SAS was specifically designed with a vastly more straightforward and robust connection architecture than parallel SCSI. Gone are the tedious shared bus issues (SCSI ID settings, drive termination, total cable length constraints, etc.) that plague parallel SCSI storage environments; SAS banishes such concerns with the elegant simplicity of point-to-point architecture.

Author: By Mike Micheletti, Product Manager
LeCroy Corporation

Administrators are often faced with choosing between a newer, more exciting technology or going with an existing, proven one. When it comes to server storage, the choice today is between the Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives and storage devices based on the Serial Attached SCSI interface (SAS).

SAS has become the next evolution of SCSI and significantly expands on the capabilities of its parallel predecessor. SATA has effectively replaced the ATA/Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) standard that was used for years in desktop hard drives and CD/DVD drives. SATA drives have always been inexpensive and easy to work with, but they have also lagged behind SAS drives in terms of performance.

Author: David Woolf
UNH-IOL Senior Technical Staff

Since 2004, UNH-IOL and SCSI Trade Association have teamed up to offer six major Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) plugfest events, the most recent one occurring in April, 2006, at the UNH-IOL facility in Durham, New Hampshire. Plugfest events have proven to be excellent opportunities to test emerging SAS products and prove the viability, durability and reliability of this new storage I/O technology.