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SAS Shows Its Face
Products that will take SAS to blades and to shared systems with SATA are popping up
August 17, 2005
4 Min Read
Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) vendors are maneuvering for position ahead of an anticipated crush of product launches later this year and early in 2006.
In the past week or so, weve seen announcements for SAS on blade servers as well as combined SATA/SAS enclosures -- two kinds of products that will push SAS storage. At the moment, SAS is primarily used in servers.
The announcements cover chips, disk drives, and controllers and will almost certainly be followed by similar products. Here's a rundown:
Chips PMC-Sierra Inc. (Nasdaq: PMCS) today announced 24- and 36-port expander switch chips for blade servers, including zoning specifications developed with Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) to provide partitioning, security policies, policy management, and compatibility with SAS controllers, HBAs, and disk arrays (see PMC-Sierra Expands SAS ).
Travis Karr, PMC-Sierra’s enterprise storage division marketing director, says he thinks his company has at least a six-month lead over rivals LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE: LSI) and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: VTSS) for developing expanders for blade servers, although he doesn’t expect product to ship through OEMs until the second quarter of 2006.
But PMC-Sierra is chasing LSI on the server front. While PMC-Sierra has not announced any SAS design wins -- although HP is a good candidate -- LSI recently lined up OEM deals with Fujitsu Siemens Computers and HP (see HP Integrates LSI Logic SAS and LSI Powers Fujitsu Siemens Platforms). LSI also added SAS support to its MyStorage HBA management software earlier this month in anticipation of SAS ramping in SANs (see LSI Enhances MyStorage Software). Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: VTSS) has not announced any design wins yet for its SAS expanders either, but the company expects to be shipping through OEMs around October (see Vitesse Expands SAS). Disk Drives Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), Fujitsu Computer Products of America Inc., Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO), and Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE: STX) are shipping SAS drives, primarily in servers with direct attached storage (see Hitachi Delivers Extreme Performance, Fujitsu Partners on SCSI Storage, Maxtor Extends Drives to Include SAS, and Seagate Launches SAS Program ). But Seagate Monday started shipping its Nearline 35 Series SATA drives through the channel in anticipation of system integrators combining them with SAS drives in networked storage arrays (see Report: SATA & SAS to Share Systems). Seagate previously shipped its NL35 drives only through OEMs.
“The sweet spot [for Nearline 35] is in SAS architectures,” Seagate’s marketing director, Pete Seege, says. “We’ve heard from a lot of system designers, and one reason they’re going with SAS is the ability to use SATA with them in the same enclosures.”
RAID Controllers Ario Data Networks last week announced a 4-Gbit/s RAID controller supporting SAS and SATA drives, which it expects storage system OEMs to ship by the end of the year (see ARIO Goes 4Gig). Ario’s Sanario FS will allow SAN system vendors to build arrays supporting SATA and SAS.
Bottom line? The SAS rollout is clearly picking up steam. "It’s just about showtime now, real products are rolling out,” says David Steele, LSI Logic’s director of product planning.
Since the show is still primarily on the server level, Steele says he expects SAS networked storage products to lag direct-attached storage by around six months. According to analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group, SAS will play a bigger role in servers prior to moving to networked storage, just as its parallel SCSI predecessor did.Taneja says SAS will win a place in storage as another tier in systems with SATA -- allowing customers to mix primary and backup disks in the same system. But while serial SCSI outperforms parallel SCSI, Taneja does not expect it to overtake Fibre Channel as the top choice for primary storage -- or SATA as a cheaper alternative for secondary storage.
“SAS vendors did a brilliant thing when they made the interface the same as SATA,” Taneja says. “If they hadn’t done that, SAS would have died. Now I think anybody who used SCSI will use SAS. But Fibre Channel is going to hold its own, especially as its costs come down.”
— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
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