The migration to serial-attached storage products — which use fewer cables than
As a further improvement over parallel
Nancy Marrone, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), discussed the benefits firms are expecting from serial technologies.
their parallel brethren — continued Monday when Adaptec spearheaded an
initiative with partners to deliver the industry’s first serial-attached SCSI
Milpitas, Calif.’s Adaptec will work with Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxtor and
Seagate to co-market the disk drives to the enterprise. Financial terms were
not disclosed.
What the development initiative will do is allow original equipment
manufacturers and system integrators to design and test prototype Serial
Attached SCSI products. This will also ensure compatibility of the Serial
Attached SCSI interface with both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk
drives to give OEMs, resellers and IT organizations more flexible disk
drives.
Adaptec’s Serial Attached SCSI interface will enable customers to plug
Serial Attached SCSI or Serial ATA drives into one backplane. OEMs
and IT managers may then configure drive arrays with either drive
technology, or both. Adaptec’s Serial Attached SCSI controllers will feature data
transfer rates of 3 gigabits per second with a roadmap to 12 gigabits per
second for such applications as mainline storage, video editing, and
streaming video and audio in direct-attached, networked-attached and
networked storage environments.
technologies, the drives will employ long, thin cables and small connectors
to improve chassis airflow and cooling and simplify cable routing. Adaptec’s Serial Attached SCSI chips and controllers
will feature the company’s RAID technology to protect customer data.
Industry experts believe serial-attached SCSI architectures are better
equipped to meet computing demands for performance than parallel SCSI
architectures.
“ESG thinks that serial ATA is catching on for two reasons – the first is of
course cost. SATA is a great low cost alternative for secondary storage
solutions (some organizations may feel comfortable with SATA being their
primary disk, but we haven’t seen much of that in the enterprise as of yet),” Marrone told internetnews.com. “The second key reason SATA will be successful is the push to make it interchangeable with SCSI. Vendors are working to make serial SCSI drives
compatible with serial ATA drives. This level of interchangeability will
both reduce production costs for vendors and provide users with a level of
flexibility they never had before.”
Marrone said if a user can buy a system that can use either disk technology, they can choose when to use higher end SCSI vs SATA depending on business requirements and costs. “That alone will make the technology pretty attractive vs. parallel ATA.”
The impetus for the play simple: to push market demand
forward by showing customers that it is willing to work to
make interoperable products unbound by proprietary issues. The move is not
unlike multiple storage vendors creating and supporting the Storage
Management Interoperability Specification (SMI-S) to better handle the
complications of storage networking.
Mike Chenery, vice president, advanced products engineering at Fujitsu
Computer Products of America, discussed his company’s desire to work with
Adaptec and others on this matter.
“Serial Attached SCSI reduces the footprint of enterprise storage
connections to enable dense form factors and smooth the migration to server
blades,” said Chenery.
Maxtor sees similar value for this venture.
“Serial ATA drives will meet the needs of customers requiring cost-effective
capacity for near-line storage of email archives and other reference data,
while Serial Attached SCSI drives will deliver the highest levels of
performance and reliability for bandwidth-intensive enterprise
environments,” said Mike Wingert, Maxtor’s executive vice president and
general manager, Server Products Group.
The firms will embark on such co-marketing activities as prototype
demonstrations, speaking engagements at major trade shows, white papers on
implementing Serial Attached SCSI solutions, seminars and Webinars.
Adaptec, Partners Team on Serial SCSI Products
