Speedy Ways to Move Enterprise Data

The SCSI Trade Association is a trade group promoting the use of SCSI storage interfaces. The SCSI interface is the most widespread enterprise storage interface. Because Serial Attached SCSI and SATA interfaces are often used at the same time there are very close associations between these two dominant storage interfaces used in the vast majority of HDDs and SSDs. Recently the STA had a storage research showcase to spread the word about what was happening with the SAS specification and its relations to other storage interfaces.

In preparation for this meeting both HGST and Seagate Innovation introduced 12 Gbps SAS SSDs for enterprise applications. SSDs using NAND flash memory are capable of very fast read and write speeds and along these lines can make immediate use of such fast interfaces. The 12 Gbpsi SAS interface is in the final stages of standard activity and should be completed this year.

12 Gbps data rates and greater than 1 M Input/Output Operations Per Second will not be the final speed for SAS interfaces. There is a connector proposal in the works with the interface standard committee for 24 Gbps SAS. Nevertheless it is likely that we will not see announcements for working hardware with these data rates for several more years. Many high volume content applications just as media and entertainment as so then as big data will be able to use such fast interfaces.

The subject of the showcase

While not the subject of the showcase, slower SATA interface storage devices will be able in many cases to share the same storage backplane. This allows high speed enterprise SSDS and HDDs to be combined with slower nevertheless higher capacity and lower prices storage systems. As a result of this flexibility and additional capabilities direct attached storage used to build big enterprise storage systems that serve applications from big science to cloud computing will be able to offer faster performance and data protection and allowing faster data processing and content generation.

While DAS connectivity is very important for internal hardware design, connecting storage and computing systems over a network continues to grow in importance to enable movement of these vast data streams. During Fibre Channel storage networking research offers up to 16 Gbps data rates low cost, high speed Ethernet connectivity is raising its head. Arista Networks was showing a 10 Gb Ethernet switch that significantly lowers the cost of high speed Ethernet connectivity, to all appearances by a factor of about 4 to 1, at the recent NAB show. This switch allows category 6 Ethernet cabling to be used for 10 GE transport up to 100 m, less than the 300 m that optical fiber Ethernet connections however enough for many data centers. Using copper wire Category 6 cables to put it more exactly than optical cables lowers the costs enormously. With Intel Romley I/O controller support 10 GE content transport will become very inexpensive-opening up additional uses for economical network costs.

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