STA

By LSI Logic

Today’s enterprise storage landscape is dominated by products using the SCSI interface. With close to 90 percent market share of all enterprise-class storage systems, SCSI is clearly the most widely deployed, high-availability enterprise storage I/O technology in use. Over its twenty-year history SCSI has evolved dramatically, currently offering a parallel interface that supports data rates of up to 320 Mbytes/sec. Throughout those two decades SCSI has remained a compelling interface, to system designers and IT professionals alike, because it offers three critical advantages: high performance, exceptional flexibility with the ability to connect to multiple peripherals, and proven backward compatibility.

As with the introduction of any new technology, the migration from parallel SCSI to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) requires OEMs give due consideration to the implementation, deployment, and maintenance of new SAS-based solutions. That said, transitioning from a parallel architecture to a serial, point-to-point model may prove less daunting than some expect, while providing investment protection well into the future.

Adaptec recently met with a group of Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to get their insights into today’s storage market. Representing one of those VARs was Vince Conroy, Chief Technology Officer of NACIO Systems, a full-service provider of managed hosting, storage and connectivity solutions for businesses that rely on the Internet for daily operations. In the following interview Mr. Conroy shares his views on how Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) will help his customers protect their storage investments.

Never before has the enterprise enjoyed such a broad variety of storage solutions from which to choose. Innovative new offerings in both hardware and software seem to appear almost daily, promising unprecedented flexibility to specify the most appropriate, targeted solution for any storage challenge.

Yet in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, IT budgets continue to undergo close scrutiny, leading prudent managers to view untested new solutions with a cautious eye. Indeed, more than a few veteran IT professionals have been known to instinctively flinch at the phrase "technology breakthrough." Why? Not because they eschew technical progress (far from it), but simply because hard-earned experience has shown them that deploying fundamentally unfamiliar solutions can be a "two steps forward, one step back" proposition.

That is, many of the gains offered by a new hardware or software solution can be initially offset by the time and expense needed to integrate it into the current computing environment--including modification or replacement of existing infrastructure, and retraining IT personnel to deploy, maintain and troubleshoot the unfamiliar solution. Downtime and diminished productivity during this transitional period are not uncommon.

By: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

The ATA and SCSI hard drive interfaces that are commonly associated with desktop and enterprise storage applications are examples of parallel bus architectures. These architectures will eventually transition to serial implementations to improve data signal integrity, enable smaller designs and overcome the bandwidth limitations of their predecessors. The new serial interfaces--Serial ATA (SATA) for PCs and workstations and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) for mission-critical computing--have also been designed to improve performance, reliability and scalability. There are several attributes that combine to substantially reduce the total cost of ownership for desktop and enterprise storage.

These emerging interface standards offer investment protection as a result of the following: configuration flexibility, backward compatibility and a performance roadmap extending out nearly a decade. Let's look at each of the characteristics in greater detail:

Author: Debika Ingham
Intel Corporation

With the advent of any new interface, users of the technology invariably ask, "Now what do I have to buy?" And perhaps more importantly, "What existing investments have been protected?" The transition to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) will ensure many levels of investment protection, both during its initial stages and long thereafter.