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Surveying Today's Most Popular Storage Interfaces

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Surveying Today's Most Popular Storage Interfaces COVER FEATURE Surveying Today’s Most Popular Storage Interfaces Backed by strong industry support, SCSI, Fibre Channel, IEEE 1394, Serial ATA, and iSCSI provide the technologies to meet IT’s diverse storage interface needs. Michael T. torage interfaces have been a necessary one another to work as a coherent system. LoBue component of computer systems since Today’s storage interface arena consists of LoBue & Majdalany computing’s inception. At a basic level, a diverse industry standards combined with R&D Management Group storage interface functions like any investments from major industry players who con- S generic interface, defining the boundary tinue to aid in the evolution of these numerous between two dissimilar surfaces or systems. In a technologies. Although SCSI—the Small Computer computer system, a storage interface defines both System Interface—is probably the most pivotal the boundaries between storage devices—such as standard in use today, other crucial storage proto- hard drives, tape drives, or similar media—and cols include Fibre Channel, IEEE 1394, Serial ATA, how those dissimilar computing resources engage and iSCSI. SCSI: An Enterprise Foundation Harry Mason LSI Logic Corp. riginating as a general-purpose interface stan- Fueled by low-cost controller devices, a maturing dard, SCSI debuted with rich capabilities, software base, and clear market value, SCSI com- O including multi-initiator support, sophisti- manded a substantial presence in both the desktop cated error management, out-of-box connectivity, and server markets. Using SCSI allowed adding and support for a wide variety of peripherals. SCSI’s drives with faster spindle speeds to workstations, immediate popularity with Apple Macintosh users adding optical drives and scanners to PCs, and using spawned a market for various peripheral devices tape to maintain streaming capabilities in servers. connected outside the desktop box. SCSI made systems simpler. Functional upgrades to the volume PC market made SCSI an attractive, Early developments profitable option that encouraged a steady stream of Although the standard’s founders knew SCSI must ongoing market investments—ranging from silicon evolve to enjoy continued success, the enterprise-class suppliers to cable, connector, and terminator sources. capabilities they envisioned had yet to be exploited. Instead, a rather small enterprise market, and various Enterprise adoption retail and database applications, focused on enter- SCSI’s low-cost mission-critical capabilities made prise-oriented companies like NCR, which sought to it a perfect choice for the vast majority of enter- help multi-initiator applications flourish. prise-class systems. Manufacturers who followed 48 Computer 0018-9162/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE Table 1. Serial Attached SCSI features and benefits. Feature Benefits Leverages industry standards Fast time to market Improved interoperability Performance roadmap to 6.0 Gbps the standard focused on improving enterprise capa- Allows coexistence with SATA Flexible price-performance points bilities across their product lines, from standard disk drives Single backplane design high-volume servers to the most sophisticated such Point-to-point architecture Ease of scalability as Symmetrix. supports more than 128 devices Flexible topologies Eliminating the cabling between devices within Thinner cables and fewer signals Improved cable routing, airflow, and cooling a storage enclosure provides a key example of Smaller connectors Meets requirement for dual-port enterprise adapting to the market’s demands. By establishing 2.5-inch hard disk drives backplane standards for “hot plugging” devices and instituting a move to low-voltage differential signaling schemes, SCSI greatly improved system Ultra 640 SCSI’s greater promise, parallel SCSI will performance while maintaining the connection likely remain an essential factor in enterprise systems lengths required between devices. and device connection schemes for years to come. Even with such significant changes, SCSI’s However, as with any parallel connection scheme, unique shared distributed bus structure let older moving these interfaces forward becomes measur- devices coexist with the latest generation of SCSI ably more difficult with each generation. Supporting peripherals. The creation of SCSI Expander com- smaller, power-efficient form factors at a drive data ponents further supported the use of legacy periph- rate doubling every 2.2 years—while maintaining eral devices and their accompanying software. signal integrity for such high-availability systems— presents a substantial challenge. Broadening SCSI’s market appeal Although SCSI adequately addressed system Serial Attached SCSI connectivity needs at the drive-interface level, the With an eye to the future, and mindful of their col- market demanded greater connectivity between lective enterprise legacy, several leading companies systems and storage subsystems—especially in have embraced a new storage initiative—Serial larger systems. Managing large volumes of storage Attached SCSI. Table 1 lists Serial Attached SCSI’s as a unified resource required connections that features and benefits. Standardization on this new allowed for increased distances between boxes, interface has the potential to bring together the best higher degrees of scalability, and failover and load- of parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel, and the emerging balancing schemes to govern these connections. Serial ATA. Fibre Channel effectively met the new demands Just as parallel SCSI embraced the challenges of of mission-critical application environments by hot plugging and improved signaling, Serial using the SCSI protocol’s enterprise-proven logi- Attached SCSI is now responding to the challenges cal-connection capabilities. Carrying the logical of tomorrow’s mission-critical application envi- command descriptor block structure of SCSI for- ronments, which include ward proved a critical step in serving enterprise- class environments. In effect, Fibre Channel • smaller form factors, expanded SCSI’s influence into storage area net- • greater addressability with support for higher works, making the logical SCSI interface essential spindle counts, to Fibre Channel’s market position. • greater flexibility for in-box and near-box Fibre Channel’s success proved SCSI’s value and cabling schemes, marked its place as an essential foundation for sub- • increased reliability with dual-porting capa- sequent enterprise storage initiatives, including bilities, and Storage over IP, iSCSI, and InfiniBand. • unprecedented customer choice. Ultra 320 SCSI and beyond Complementing the SATA interface development’s With the current generation of Ultra 320 SCSI efforts, Serial Attached SCSI lets the customer choose components, controllers, and drives, systems can among SATA drives competitively priced for a sustain performance levels in excess of 100,000 cost-driven volume market. These drives deliver a I/Os per second while working smoothly with cus- connection scheme that accepts high-performance, tomers’ existing hardware. New generations of robust storage devices capable of serving the most SCSI devices can consistently coexist with previ- demanding enterprise applications. By employing ous generations, thus preserving 20-plus years of SATA physical signaling and mating schemes, enterprise-proven SCSI software. embracing Fibre Channel’s packet-based approach With the proven capabilities of Ultra 320 SCSI and to switched SCSI connections, and preserving the December 2002 49 logical SCSI protocol itself, Serial Attached scheme that lets OEMs, system integrators, and cus- SCSI promises new interface capabilities for tomers choose how best to develop their storage SCSI’s serial point- the enterprise. application environment. to-point connection Serial Attached SCSI serves the enterprise The industry’s commitment to furthering SCSI’s scheme lets users by leveraging a common mating scheme, interface capabilities has made it a lasting founda- choose how best enclosure, and infrastructure. This flexible tion for the enterprise. The ANSI-accredited T10 to develop their connection scheme presents opportunities for Technical Committee (http://www.t10.org) is at building products that could ship as soon as work on this industry-standard development ini- storage application 2004. tiative. Meanwhile, the SCSI Trade Association, environment. STA (http://www.scsita.org), holds the responsibil- SCSI’s bright future ity for the interface’s business development. SCSI has fundamentally influenced the enterprise market’s evolution. Every new stor- Harry Mason is the director of industry marketing age initiative demonstrates its significance in the at LSI Logic Corp. Mason received an MS in elec- enterprise. Serial Attached SCSI propels this influ- trical engineering from the University of Missouri. ence well into the future by maintaining compati- He has been the president of the SCSI Trade Asso- bility with SCSI’s rich and successful legacy. This ciation for five of the past six years. Contact him protocol offers a serial point-to-point connection at [email protected]. Fibre Channel Delivers Thomas Hammond-Doel Vixel he problems IT managers face—the explosion tocols access the underlying transport layer, of storage needs, proliferation of rich-content including TCP/IP over Fibre Channel. T media, and Internet use—are quickly making • Increase device count per controller. Fibre older, direct-attached storage technology obsolete. Channel introduces an arbitrated loop, A new paradigm in storage has
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