STA

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.

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.

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

"The only constant is change" is surely a familiar (and vexing) maxim to storage managers around the world. Grappling with this ever-present challenge requires a storage interface capable of both meeting today's requirements and seamlessly adapting as priorities inevitably evolve over time. Until recently, addressing an enterprise's broad range of storage needs required a combination of SCSI and Serial ATA (SATA) infrastructures, an inefficient and unwieldy approach.

But now the rules have changed, thanks to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and its compatibility with SATA. A key component of the SAS feature suite, this ground-breaking compatibility produces remarkable storage synergies and efficiencies, enabling IT professionals to achieve their performance and capacity objectives with a single SAS infrastructure.

The one-two punch of the SAS/SATA value proposition is simple: SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) deliver the speed, reliability and scalability demanded in high-availability enterprise environments, while high-capacity SATA drives are purpose-built for bulk storage applications, combining low cost per GB and greater reliability and scalability than their parallel ATA ancestors.

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.