Putting Serial Attached SCSI to Work for You
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SAS END-USER GUIDE Putting Serial Attached SCSI to Work for You INTRODUCTION Moving to Serial Technologies Parallel SCSI technology has been the widely deployed standard in server and storage Over the past three years, Serial data centers for the last 20 years. While parallel SCSI has been a reliable standard Attached SCSI (SAS) has been interface, the technology has reached its highest performance level with the advent of unveiled as the next evolution of Ultra320. As servers are pushed to meet advancing system and application computing the SCSI standard — featuring requirements, parallel SCSI has struggled with signal skew and crosstalk, signal increased performance, termination restrictions, cable and connector reflections, and device addressability — scalability, and reliability, while all of which have become barriers to next-generation throughput performance. maintaining ease-of-use and the Industry leaders in server and storage computing have been working together to SCSI feature set that has made overcome this throughput performance challenge. The result of this intensive SCSI the de facto standard in investigation has resulted in transitioning parallel SCSI to a serial interface. Serial enterprise computing technology transmits data in a single stream instead of the multiple streams found in environments. The first SAS parallel technology, therefore it is not tied to a particular clock speed and can transfer data at a much higher rate (up to 30 times faster) than parallel technology. It also offers products are starting to become greater reliability and scalability. available, and represent the first step in making SAS a widely Serial technology is not new. In fact, the SCSI evolution was based on the widely pervasive serial network already deployed in the datacenter. In the late 1990s, storage adopted technology standard. utilization and growth were critical issues facing the datacenter. The result was proposals This guide from Adaptec will and products that aggregated storage on a dedicated ‘storage network’.This helped IT help you understand Serial managers to consolidate and effectively manage and grow their aggregated enterprise data Attached SCSI: what it is, how it pools. Yet, successful implementation required long distance support and high speed with minimal latency to provide rapid access to critical information that was now consolidated works, how it can help you get away from the data center. The answer was Fibre Channel, the first serial technology to higher storage performance at a gain significant momentum in the mainstream enterprise marketplace. lower price point, and how to put By 2002, storage networks had become pervasive in the enterprise. Yet the amount of this transition to the best use for information continued to grow, in response to the efficiency of these networks and the your existing storage and future user perspective that all data is critical data. This organic data growth coincided with storage needs. strict new government data retention requirements (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley) that meant that For many years Adaptec has been a new “class” of storage — non-mission-critical data — had to be kept readily accessible for a number of years. So, the industry wrestled with the next major technology the leader in SCSI products and requirement, a way to cost-effectively manage the exploding amount of storage content in technology, and is bringing this the IT infrastructure. expertise to the SAS market. Cost became the principle focus. Solution vendors and industry leaders responded with During the transition to SAS, the introduction of Serial ATA (SATA), which serialized the low-cost, high-volume count on us to provide you with desktop-class ATA hard drives with a new interface that provided adequate reliability and the information you need to use performance for non-mission-critical information. Companies with data protection this technology and get the most expertise, such as Adaptec, responded by helping to drive best-in-class RAID technology, from your storage investment. that when paired with SATA hard drives, provided optimized technology at a much lower cost. SATA also provided higher disk interconnect speeds of 1.5Gb/s (SATA I) and 3Gb/s (SATA II). The future is exciting for SATA, as speeds continue to increase (up to 6Gb/s in the future) and some enterprise capabilities will be enhanced, including hot swap and simplified cabling. Meanwhile, the technology will maintain the ATA family commitment of driving the lowest acquisition cost per megabyte for enterprise IT centers. SAS END-USER GUIDE Putting Serial Attached SCSI to Work for You 2 SAS delivers the high What is Serial Attached SCSI? performance, scalability, and Finally, the most pervasive enterprise technology has come to a crossroads. Parallel SCSI reliability required for bandwidth- is the heart of the datacenter, used as the standard interconnect and hard drive hungry mainstream servers and communication scheme for server and storage environments. Companies had been enterprise storage. developing and utilizing SCSI for over 20 years as the mainstay for enterprise storage. But the technology’s future was coming into question. Quite simply, the parallel interface SAS lends itself to the high- would have to be overhauled to address next generation concerns of signal integrity, frequency, immediate random performance and reliability, right down to fundamentals like cable length. data access required for The result of three years of industry discussions and technological investigation is Serial transactional data applications Attached SCSI (SAS), the next standard in enterprise server and storage technology. SAS such as online purchases and bank is a high-performance solution that leverages proven SCSI functionality, and builds on transactions and provides the the enterprise expertise of multiple chip, board, drive, subsystem, and server performance and security required manufacturers throughout the industry. It provides better performance and flexibility for mission-critical applications than the serial technology, Fibre Channel, at a lower cost and with the same, or ever which demand data redundancy. better, reliability. Key SAS Features Include: “Adaptec validates the vision • SAS and SATA drive support providing an unprecedented level of choice in the of the Serial Attached SCSI enterprise — the flexibility of integrating either SAS and/or SATA devices in common standard – with its SCSI server or storage solutions, providing customization to meet cost or performance technology leadership, needs in unique business environments comprehensive understanding • reliable point-to-point connections at 3Gb/s — up to 128 devices (or 16,256 of reseller and end-user addressable devices per port) requirements, and a broad range • full dual-ported connections for performance or failover capabilities, delivering robust of products that can be mix-and- data protection and reliability right to the hard drive • enterprise features including native command queuing and greater than 2TB LUN matched into SAS-based solutions support that meet a new range of storage • available in multiple hot-swappable disk drive performance and form factor performance and pricepoint configurations including high value 3.5” 10k rpm drives, high performance 3.5” 15k needs.” rpm drives and emerging 2.5” high density drives for performance server and specialized high-performance storage applications Greg Schulz, Sr. Analyst, • thinner cabling than SCSI and ATA which delivers new cooling metrics and more The Evaluator Group efficient airflow — critical in a dense computing environment where low profile servers are racked and stacked with multiple external storage chassis. Effective heat management and cooling schemes remain a top priority for IT managers today delivering enhanced uptime and reliability guarantees in application sensitive environments. SAS delivers the high performance, scalability, and reliability required for bandwidth- hungry mainstream servers and enterprise storage. SAS lends itself to the high-frequency, immediate random data access required for transactional data applications such as online purchases and bank transactions and provides the performance and security required for mission-critical applications which demand data redundancy. Most importantly, IT managers today cannot risk deploying the wrong type of solution. Today, server or storage solutions represent finite choices — you must choose early on whether you want a SATA-optimized server or storage solution, or whether you will pay more upfront for a parallel SCSI optimized server or storage solution. If you deploy the low-cost SATA solution, but the performance and reliability metrics fail to meet internal user expectations and uptime service guarantees, the choice is straightforward — pick a weekend, forklift upgrade the application and storage infrastructure, and hope that you SAS END-USER GUIDE Putting Serial Attached SCSI to Work for You 3 can redeploy a new SCSI-based solution before the weekend is through. This does not account for the vendor negotiation of taking back the ‘slightly used’ SATA solution, and replacing it with a SCSI solution. SAS breaks these barriers. Deploying standard server and storage chassis based on SAS architecture makes it easy to purchase and maintain service spares by leveraging common components (power supplies, memory, etc.), and ensures that IT staff is up to speed and very comfortable with the server and storage solution. The most compelling part of SAS