STA

ATTEN-SHUN Serial Storage Wire Readers!

Whether you use Siri, Outlook, Google, or an old fashioned day timer, you'll want to mark your calendars now for Wednesday May 9, 2012. It's a special day for STA and one you simply can't miss. From 6:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. that evening, STA will be opening the doors to its free Technology Showcase at the Santa Clara Hyatt featuring a packed-full agenda of SAS storage products and technologies demonstrations, special guest speakers, high-level networking, a hosted reception and more beastly surprises.

Increase media access and server scalability while reducing latency and TCO

The growth in Cloud computing is driving new innovations to enable a wider array of supported applications. Email server, interactive databases and transaction processing applications require increased media access, application failover, reduced latency, and greater scalability. Technology is poised to deliver on these requirements while maintaining focus on total cost of ownership (TCO). Two areas of technology that are addressing the latency and cost requirements of the Cloud are virtualization and High-availability clustering.

The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) has about two dozen Technical Committees that develop standards for both ANSI and ISO/IEC. T10 (http://www.t10.org/), the Technical Committee for SCSI storage interfaces is the largest of these Technical Committees with a membership of nearly 80 organizations. All modern storage devices comply with one or more standards developed in T10.

It's nothing new that technology changes rapidly. Enterprise storage is no exception. Keeping data moving at faster speeds and having the ability to properly manage that data has never been more critical to having businesses run smoothly. Applications such as database, commerce and transaction, web serving and streaming use massive amounts of data and storage requirements continue to increase. New technologies need to be integrated into these storage architectures to reduce potential bottlenecks.

6Gb/s SAS Market Update
The market for 6Gb/s SAS is in full swing. Server motherboards are configured with 6Gb/s SAS devices, or RAID controllers. SAS expanders, which allow for incremental scaling of SATA and SAS drive connects, are seeing volume deployments in systems and drive enclosures. By protecting investments in legacy middleware, SAS rapidly transformed the mainstream server market and elevated itself into the leading enterprise storage interconnect. The transition from 3Gb/s SAS to 6Gb/s SAS continued to evolve with the addition of enhanced enterprise-capabilities such as standardized zoning, and expander discovery. The addition of this increased functionality has helped to open new markets and applications, pushing SAS deeper into high-availability storage solutions.

Hello Serial Storage Wire Readers!

You may have noticed that we've been on a hiatus for the past number of months. We have been diligently working on a new STA website and, accordingly, Serial Storage Wire site. Please visit our newly launched STA website (www.scsita.org), and see the Serial Storage Wire archives (www.scsita.org/serial-storage-wire) too. We have introduced many new features that will help you find the information you need.

Author: Mike Karp, VP and Principal Analyst
Ptak, Noel and Associates

SCSI devices — first parallel and now, SAS — provide the lion's share of enterprise storage devices, and it seems likely that this leadership role will continue well into the foreseeable future. This is because as demands for better performance, configuration flexibility and manageability have increased over time, the SAS standard and the products that support it have also evolved. Second-generation SAS products are well established in the marketplace today, and progress continues with the design of a third-generation product set, which will begin to roll out in 2012.

Because first-generation SAS operated at 3Gb per second, second-generation operates at 6Gb per second, and the next generation will operate at 12Gb per second, most end-users continue to think of each generation in terms of its bus speed. Bus bandwidth provides a handy and descriptive shorthand, but there is much more going on than faster I/O.

SAS/SATA Compatibility. It's been a goal of the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology since its inception. Originally this meant that a Serial ATA (SATA) drive could be plugged into a SAS port and work well. But that was back in the 3Gb/s SAS days.

Wanted: 6Gb/s SAS Case Studies and Article Ideas for the Serial Storage Wire Newsletter and the STA Website!

The SCSI Trade Association is offering a unique opportunity for Serial Storage Wire readers to provide 6Gb/s SAS case studies for which they will be rewarded.

Author: Harry Mason, President, SCSI Trade Association
Director of Industry Marketing, LSI Corp.

SSDs are low-latency storage devices that are finding their way into workstations, servers, and networked storage devices. Many of the uses for these devices are found in system-level caching environments, however recent cost improvements have made SSDs attractive for accelerating applications such as database searches.