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 GO SAS FOR CONTROLLER HARDWARE |
by Chris Angelini, Reseller Advocate Magazine
www.reselleradvocate.com
IF YOU COULD OFFER YOUR CUSTOMER SERIAL ATTACHED STORAGE TECHNOLOGY AND ALL OF THE BENEFITS IT OFFERS AT THE SAME PRICE AS SATA, YOU'D BE A FOOL NOT TO. After all, SAS gives you better performance, scalability outside the box, and 24x7 reliability. SMBs often shun SAS hardware because it costs more. However, LSI Logic recently slashed the prices on many of its SAS controllers, pushing that excuse right out the window. And because SAS boards are compatible with SATA hard drives, your forward-thinking business customers should be laying an upgradeable SAS foundation, primed for both serial drive technologies.
The ability to mix drives is only one page from SAS' victory speech, but it's an important one. SATA controllers are always limited to SATA hard drives. On the other hand, a SAS card will take any combination of SAS or SATA. When rubber hits the road and it's time to start running Exchange Server or SQL Server full-time on your customer's SBS 2003 machine, adding SAS storage is a painless process.
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No Reason Not To:
If you're rolling out storage controller hardware, there's no reason not to tap the scalability of a SAS controller, especially now that many of LSI Logic's MegaRAID cards are at cost parity with SATA-only boards. |
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Now imagine that same SBS box is a simple 1U rack-mount loaded with four 3.5" drives. Filled to the brim and desperately in need of more capacity, a card like LSI Logic's MegaRAID 8344ELP lets you take SAS and SATA storage out of the server and into a JBOD enclosure with room to grow. The card's four external SAS links are good for 1.2 GBps of bandwidth, which is plenty for an 8- or 12- drive add-on. SATA cards just can't give you that scalability.
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Coming to a Backplane Near You:
One of the benefits proffered by SAS is scalability through expanders. Connect your controller card to a backplane and field eight or more drives with four ports. |
Of course, SAS also has a performance story to tell. Designed as the true successor to old school SCSI, SAS is the technology of choice when your customer is taxing storage by reading from a database all day, for example. SATA hardware only sends data in one direction at a time. But like Fibre Channel, SAS enjoys bi-directional communication, potentially doubling throughput.
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Foot in the Door:
When connectivity and cost take precedence over hardware acceleration, LSI Logic's SAS 8208ELP gives you eight SAS and SATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. |
Despite the technology's speed, SAS moves information more reliably than SATA. SAS drives feature dual ports, which allow independent paths to each disk. Should one controller card fail or a cable get accidentally yanked out, the second port allows uninterrupted operation. The drives themselves are manufactured to tighter specifications, too. A SAS controller lets you install fault-tolerant SAS drives to protect sensitive storage and high-capacity SATA on the same RAID controller for backup.
The SAS message is loaded with value. With one card, you can support two types of hard drives, run servers around the clock, and reach out to external enclosures. Now that the price of SAS cards is lower than ever, now is the perfect time to start deploying the technology in all of your SMB servers.
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