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Author: Thomas M. Coughlin, President,
Coughlin Associates

With entertainment and media content increasing in resolution, content data files have swelled and data throughput has increased proportionally. At the same time content producers are under more pressure to control prices than ever before. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)-based storage systems play a big role in making these seemingly contrary goals possible.

Digital Production Means Lots of Bytes
The introduction of digital production technology is a great enabler of professional creativity. It encourages new levels of realism and special effects in the content and increases the efficiency of production at the same time as it decreases the costs of production. Because of the ease of digital capture of video content, producers now shoot a lot more hours before editing. This results in many more hours of content than was the case for film capture, similar to the trend seen with the conversion from film to digital still photography.

Generally, digital content producers shoot 10X more hours of content than was typical with film production. Digital production has resulted in more content, and increasingly more content is kept on associated post-production storage systems. Furthermore this digital content is kept on-line for a longer period of time. Some facilities even use disk arrays for active archives.

Author: Russ Fellows, Analyst
Evaluator Group

Why Consider SAS?

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is both a storage interface to disk and tape drives, as well as a storage connectivity technology. As the natural evolution of the older parallel Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) technology to modern technology, SAS provides application and device driver investment protection. It also provides investment protection by providing system architects another alternative for midrange storage networks while supporting both SAS and SATA storage devices.

In many ways, SAS uses the best of existing disk and connectivity technologies, leveraging Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), SCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) technology. SAS is a continuation of the highly successful SCSI protocol, updated with current serial-attached connectivity technology. Additionally, SAS connectivity supports both high-performance SAS drives and high-capacity Serial ATA (SATA) drives simultaneously. SAS connectivity, along with SAS and SATA drive choices, provides users with the ability to mix and match drive types to best meet their business application requirements. These factors all serve to provide investment protection with past storage protocols while utilizing current technologies when choosing SAS technologies.

By David G. Hill, Principal,
Mesabi Group LLC

Blade servers are now very familiar to IT organizations, but they still have a lot of growth potential. And one of the gating factors for unlocking that potential is improving the relationship of blade servers with storage. Blade servers need a close relationship with storage — just not too close. In order to get the most out of blade servers, no storage should be on the blade server itself. The storage should be either on a local "network" within a chassis (i.e., direct attached storage (DAS)) or externally on a storage area network (SAN). Why?

Take the case where a blade has its own hard disk drive (HDD) for application data. Two problems arise; one with provisioning and one with data protection. Provisioning is a capacity planning issue. What happens if the disk fills up? Neither adding another disk nor migrating to another server with more storage is a palatable solution. Data protection is about the fact that the disk is a single point of failure. For data protection purposes, the disk should be mirrored. But who wants to put two hard disks on the same server blade for cost, blade real estate, and energy budget reasons? Using storage on the blade itself for application data is not a good idea.

Author: Dan Tanner, Founder and Principal
ProgresSmart

"Feeds and speeds" matter to engineers and are quoted by shallow analysts. Price matters to the business buyer, but only in the context of effectiveness. This brief article explains why you should care about Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).

SCSI (pronounced "skuzzy"), is the acronym for Small Computer System Interface. SCSI is a standard that had been around for years, widely used in high-performance workstations and servers. But until recently, SCSI cabling and electrical interface employed cumbersome and limiting wide parallel ribbon cables and wide connectors. Making the SCSI electrical and physical cable/connecters into slim serial parts has removed complex speed to precise cabling matching requirements and eliminated the severe configuration restrictions that had plagued parallel SCSI and which had forced the invention and employment of Fibre Channel (FC) or even Internet SCSI (iSCSI). In the bargain, SAS saves on both space and, importantly, uses far less power.