STA

Author: Sam Barnett, Business Manager, Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA Storage / Storage Networking Products, Storage Products Group, Maxim Integrated Products

As first generation systems based on Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology enter the market, leading server and storage OEMs are racing to deliver the next group of platforms based on an ever-evolving technology landscape. Unlike other semiconductor vendors, Maxim opted to enhance its popular NexSAS™ product family concurrently with the release of generation I systems. This leapfrogging approach to the deployment of SAS technology has led to the introduction of many new products with features found only in high availability, superior performing Fibre Channel systems today. Comprised of three new high-phy-count expanders, extensions in intelligent mux/de-mux devices, a new enclosure management/SAS backplane controller, and the industry's best rate, agile signal conditioners, the NexSAS™ line delivers on the promise of high performance storage solutions for SMB (small/medium business) as well as enterprise systems.

The Maxim NexSAS™ product family is divided into four functional areas: expander technology, SAS/Serial ATA (SATA) support devices, server/enclosure/baseboard management, and signal conditioning. This article explores Generation 1.5 NexSAS™ expander technology in detail.

Author: Chaz Nichols, Global Channel Marketing and Kent Bransford, Sr. Technical Editor,
Seagate Technology

"Use the right tool for the job" is a time-honored maxim that's particularly relevant to developers and system builders seeking to deliver maximum value to their customers. Data center storage requirements continue to expand and diversify, challenging IT professionals to move beyond the traditional "speed or capacity" dichotomy to also address such issues as power consumption, system cooling, data center footprint, ease of data migration and more.

Efficiently meeting such a broad spectrum of storage requirements with only a narrow range of hard disk drives (HDDs) from which to choose is simply not possible...a fact to which many storage professionals can ruefully attest. In response to this dilemma, Seagate has recently made four compelling additions to its comprehensive Savvio, Cheetah and Barracuda ES enterprise disk drive families.

Storage solutions play a fundamental role in shaping data center footprint, power and cooling profiles, and Seagate has purpose-built its new Savvio 15K, Cheetah 15K.6, Cheetah NAS and Barracuda ES.2 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives to maximize data center ROI. By combining superior performance and capacity with significantly reduced space and energy requirements, Seagate HDDs enable you to build higher performing, greener and more eco-friendly systems.

Author: David So, Product Marketing Manager and Bruce Grieshaber, Product Manager
LSI

Over the past several years, the SCSI Trade Association (STA) has gone to great lengths to educate the public on the features and benefits of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). STA has even sponsored a series of plugfests at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab to ensure the compatibility of different vendors' SAS products with one another, thereby easing the adoption and integration of SAS into the marketplace. The result is that SAS has indisputably been accepted as the Direct Attached Storage (DAS) interconnect of choice. Since SAS' inception, the storage industry has announced a wide array of SAS infrastructure components as well as SAS-based servers and external storage systems. Today, most server platforms use SAS for the internal drive interconnect. And with the ability to support SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives, it is quickly becoming the mainstream disk drive interface for external storage enclosures.

Author: Matthew Hallberg, Storage Protocol Specialist
LeCroy Protocol Solutions Group

In today's rapidly changing, data-centric environment, one key requirement remains constant: every company needs reliable and fast access to critical business information. A company's fortunes are based on time-to-market in product development, the breadth and reliability of their product line, the availability of critical product design, sales and support information, and the access speed with which this information can be obtained. In recent years, the storage infrastructures of data centers have evolved with the introduction of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). These key infrastructure changes have resulted in better performance, better availability, and lower cost.

These improvements don't stop there, as the SAS/SATA environment is undergoing yet another revolution with the introduction of the new SAS-2 specification. One of the major changes in SAS is the doubling of the basic data rate from a previous maximum of 3.0 Gb/s per link to a new standard of 6.0 Gb/s per link. Additionally, there are some new support features in SAS-2 that are designed to be highly beneficial to data centers.

Figure 1: Two examples of Test Emulation

Author: Don Jeanette, Sr. Manager, Product Marketing
Fujitsu Computer Products of America

When computers use less energy, they cost less to operate, thereby increasing a company's profits. It does not get any simpler than that. Fujitsu has once again answered the call to helping companies save money by saving power, while at the same time, helping the environment. Fujitsu is now shipping its third generation 2.5" 10K RPM and first generation 15K RPM Enterprise hard disk drives. These drives range from 36GB up to 147GB in capacity.

While today's computers offer higher processor speeds and more memory at a lower acquisition cost than ever before, they cost much more to operate. That's because while newer server-class computers are smaller and more powerful than before, their greater processing power and increased capacity for storage make them consume more power as they perform their work.

These increasingly powerful processors, larger-scale memory devices, emit more waste heat than earlier models. They have less space in which to dissipate heat, and that heat must dissipate through higher-volume fans. Furthermore, the additional heat dissipated into data centers has to be re-dissipated using more powerful air-cooling systems.

Author: Jim Pascoe, Corporate Communications
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued a report on energy efficiency in data centers and the results were staggering. According to the EPA, energy usage at data centers doubled between 2000 and 2006, and it's poised to double again by 2011. Space, system cost and low power considerations in data centers are of primary importance to IT executives in the next few years.

In response to these trends, many data center managers have begun transitioning to small form factor enterprise hard drives for use in their server and storage applications. These 2.5-inch 10K RPM enterprise-class hard drives have been designed to deliver increased performance, improved server/storage density, greater thermal efficiency and lower total cost of ownership for enterprise computing.