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Betting Your Business on SATA/SASBy Drew RobbJuly 13, 2005
Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) made a big splash in 2004, and now we are seeing a whole new range of products hitting the market. In this article, we take a look at Ario Data Networks SATA and SAS hard drive technology. It is said to offer ways to fine-tune storage environment and save money by reducing the possibility of overprovisioning storage. "Ario provides OEMs with RAID and Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) controllers, the firmware and software that runs on those controllers, and Storage/RAID processors that also go on those same controllers," says Eric Herzog, vice president of marketing and business development at Ario Data Networks. The company has gained some prominence by being on the first companies to market with SAS technology. Herzog says the key benefits of SAS are the extension and improvement of the older parallel SCSI with a serial version. "These benefits include better performance, better scalability, better reliability as the parallel interfaces are at their limits of speed with reliable data transfers while SAS allows growth in performance to 3 Gb today and 6 Gb in '07/'08 without having reliability issues," he says. Further, SAS and SATA drives can operate in the same environment while SCSI and ATA cannot. This gives users and suppliers a lot of system design flexibility. For example, using faster SAS drives for primary storage and offloading older data to cheaper SATA disks in the same subsystem, something that could not be achieved with SCSI and ATA. That's why Gartner Inc. predicts that 64 percent of subsystem disk drives will be SATA and SAS-based by 2007. "SATA growth is on fire and I think we have only seen the beginnings of it," says Arun Taneja, an analyst with the Taneja Group. "Those companies that enhance SATA for the enterprise along the dimensions of availability, performance, scalability and density, as Ario Data has done, will continue to see serious revenues for the foreseeable future. SATA II and SAS will only increase this pressure in 2005." Product LineIts products include: SANARIO FC, a 4 Gb Fibre Channel to 4 Gb Fibre Channel External RAID controller (supports 4 Gb fibre channel hosts, HBAs and switches and 4 Gb FC disk drives); SANARIO FS, a 4 Gb Fibre Channel to SAS/SATA II External RAID controller (supports 4 Gb fibre channel hosts, HBAs and switches and 3 Gb SAS or SATA II disk drives or 1.5 Gb SATA I disk drives); SANARIO FSR, a 4 Gb Fibre Channel to SATA II External RAID controller (supports 4 Gb fibre channel hosts, HBAs and switches and 3 Gb SATA II disk drives or 1.5 Gb SATA I disk drives); SANARIO FST, a 2 Gb Fibre Channel to SATA External JBOD controller (supports 2 Gb fibre channel hosts, HBAs and switches and 1.5 Gb SATA I disk drives); SANARIO FSTII, a 2 Gb Fibre Channel to SATA II Channel External JBOD controller. According to Herzog, the company has shipped over 35,000 of SANARIO FST. The SANARIO FSR RAID board uses Ario's Xuma ASIC to combine a hardware RAID processor with integrated SATA II disk I/O and the capability for interboard communication. This enables mirrored cache and cache coherency to provide high availability on external RAID controllers. With other suppliers, OEM's have to buy an off-the-shelf processor and a disk I/O chip to do the same functions as well as chips to allow two boards to communicate with one another. Xuma does all this with one chip. "Additionally, the XUMA processor accelerates five functions used in RAID and storage processing into hardware while off-the-shelf chips only do one or two of those functions," says Herzog. "This means lower cost for higher performance - the FSR can do up to 700MB/sec data transfer rate and up to 100K cached I/O." As well as offering 3 Gb per second bandwidth, SATA II provides an enhanced command set for increase robustness. Native Command Queuing, for instance, increases performance in transaction applications, adds better fault tolerance and improves data availability for end users. Future PlansLater this year, Ario is coming out with RAID controllers with dual controller capability. In a high-availability, dual-controller subsystem, both controllers work together to improve performance over one controller. If one controller fails, the other controller takes over the array. The dead controller can also be replaced while the array is running and data is available to the servers," says Herzog. In 2006, he says, Ario will release controllers with fabric capability i.e. more than two redundant controllers that can communicate with a fabric that is "inside the box". The subsystem still communicates with external HBAs, servers, and switches, but inside the subsystem a fabric allows more than two controllers to work together. The idea is to improve performance, scalability, modularity, configuration flexibility, fault tolerance, and data availability. "The fabric will allow all these benefits inside the subsystem box," says Herzog. "It is similar to the benefits a SAN fabric offers multiple servers in a data center or the benefits that clustering offers servers - better performance in the cluster and better fault tolerance."
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