Now system builders face the hurdle of educating customers on the advantages of SAS over Ultra320 —the current and last specification for parallel SCSI. About half of all ATA hard drives sold today have a serial ATA (SATA) interface, so customers are already familiar with serial hard drive technology. But system builders say more work is needed before that acceptance extends to SAS drives. “In conversations with customers about SAS, it’s me teaching the technology,” said Chuck Orcutt, senior business development manager for Nexlink-branded servers at Seneca Data Distributors, North Syracuse, N.Y. At NCS Technologies, Manassas, Va., about half of the system builder’s customers are asking about SAS and how it performs, estimated Pranay Prakash, executive director. “Our customers are pretty knowledgeable,” he said, adding: “The other half, we push them because it’s a newer technology.” Nevertheless, system builders say the momentum toward SAS is strong, driven by technological advantages including greater performance and the ability to scale to up to 128 SAS devices on a single controller, compared with 16 for parallel SCSI. More important is the ability to mix high-performance SAS and low-cost SATA drives on the same backplane. The ability to mix the two technologies will make servers and storage subsystems easier to build and use, said Tim Poor, product manager for storage systems at Equus Computer Systems, Minneapolis. “It’s a real opportunity for greater customer choice,” he said. “Today, you need to specify performance or cost savings. Going forward, they’re all consolidated into a single platform.”  Customers are already ordering such mixed platforms. At NCS Technologies, for instance, customers are choosing SAS for mission-critical data. “They are putting the operating system on SATA and their data on SAS for reliability and performance,” Prakash said. “A typical configuration is three SAS drives with one SATA drive.”For customers of Alpharetta, Ga.-based Adtech Global Solutions’ video surveillance appliance, the preference is just the opposite. They put data on SATA, knowing the chances of system crash during an important event is low, said Ronnie Jackson, principal. They put the operating system on SAS for reliability. Factors slowing SAS adoption include a price premium ranging from 10 percent to more than 100 percent over parallel SCSI. Don’t expect those premiums to go away quickly, said Joe Cousins, vice president of marketing at Bell Microproducts, the San Jose-based distributor. Cousins said the market for enterprise-class drives through the channel has been falling as server and storage builders have adopted ATA and then SATA drives to compete with tier-one vendors. “The total available market for enterprise drives is not going to grow, so there’s no incentive to drop the price for SAS,” he said. Another inhibitor is the derth of motherboards with on-board SAS controllers. For now, Milpitas, Calif.-based Supermicro Computer is the main motherboard vendor supporting SAS. Arima, Austin, Texas, also has a motherboard with SAS support. An Intel spokesperson said that company is planning to bring SAS components to market sometime this year, but would not be more specific as to products or ship dates. That could spark the market. “Once customers see high-end server boards with SAS on them, it will take off,” said Todd Swank, director of marketing at Northern Computer Technologies, a Burnsville, Minn.-based system builder. “If customers get the motherboards, then they’ll think, ‘It’s on there; we might as well get SAS drives.’ ” Storage vendors, though, are already providing strong support for SAS. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Seagate, Maxtor and Fujitsu have already started shipping SAS hard drives. LSI Logic and Adaptec began shipping SAS adapter cards last year and offering bundles of SAS hard drives and adapter cards to the channel. Promise Technology, Irvine, Calif., expects to introduce its first SAS adapter in midyear to go with its SAS/SATA JBOD array, while QLogic plans to do so sometime this year. |
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