Serial attached storage is slated to have a major presence at the CeBIT America show in New York City this week. Storage players Adaptec, HP and Seagate
Technology plan to introduce a new interface that works with both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA to help businesses cut their IT infrastructure costs.
The companies said Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA compatibility would give companies the ability to plug disk drives employing both technologies into the same system to give IT managers, system integrators and original equipment manufacturers “unprecedented disk storage,” lowering total cost of ownership.
Specifically, storage device maker Adaptec, IT giant HP and disk drive maker Seagate hope their Serial Attached SCSI interconnect will make it easier for organizations to manage disk storage based on the performance and capacity requirements of each data type, whether they are reference data such as electronic documents, or transactional data, such as bank transactions.
The vendors said customers will enjoy a better price performance ratio from such products because Serial ATA drives will provide cost-effective capacity for reference data, while Serial Attached SCSI drives will deliver high performance, reliability and software management compatibility for transactional data. Using the two technologies, brought together by one interface, enterprises will have the ability to upgrade from Serial ATA to Serial Attached SCSI drives without having to buy a new system.
Akin to virtualization technology and the SMI-S initiative in the buzz
around its possibilities to improve data storage, serial attached storage has been gaining momentum in the industry of late. Many IT experts have found it less expensive, more scalable and more efficient than other modes of data transfer, such as parallel technologies. Serial technologies transfer data packets one at a time, while parallel technologies transfer
data concurrently.
Nancy Marrone, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), discussed the benefits firms are expecting from serial technologies. Marrone said if a user can buy a system that can use either disk technology, they can choose when to use higher end serial attached storage versus SATA depending on business requirements and costs. “That alone will make the technology pretty attractive compared to parallel ATA [and traditional SCSI].”
“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),” said Marrone. “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.”
Other benefits of the Serial Attached SCSI interconnect include: data
transfer rates of 3 gigabits/second with a roadmap to 12 gigabits/second;
dual porting for improved redundancy; expander hardware to make scalable
storage configurations of more than 16,000 mixed Serial Attached SCSI and
Serial ATA disk drives; and thinner cables and smaller connectors than
traditional parallel technologies, to allow for better chassis airflow and
cooling, simpler cable routing and design of smaller form factor hard drives
for high-density computing.
Milpitas, Calif.’s Adaptec, Palo Alto, Calif.’s HP and Scotts Valley,
Calif.’s Seagate will be on hand to demonstrate the interoperability of the
disk drives Wednesday through Friday at booth 2419 in the Jacob K. Javits
Center.
