In my last blog entry, I discussed our new disk subsystem for FAS Storage Systems, the DS4243, which we announced publicly last week. In this blog entry, I’ll begin to address why we chose a SAS based architecture. I’m sure people are asking….
Every so often, enterprise disk storage goes through a major technology transition. Back in the day, Fibre Channel hard disk drives (HDDs) began to replace disk drives using parallel SCSI technologies, which had been the standard for enterprise storage prior to that time. Given the massive growth in the amount of storage being deployed, Fibre Channel HDDs were a significant step forward—addressing the performance and ongoing reliability needs of the enterprise data center.
More recently, serial ATA (SATA) disk drives entered the enterprise storage scene and have since taken significant market share—not as a replacement to the dominant Fibre Channel HDD technology, but as a lower-cost, higher-capacity adjunct that was better suited for secondary storage applications such as online backup and archiving.
Now, another trend in enterprise disk technology is under way. Over the next several years, hard disk drives using the serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface are expected to replace Fibre Channel disk drives as the high-performance, primary storage medium of choice in enterprise storage systems. This is probably not a big news flash to many readers of this blog – in fact, most of the top tier industry analysts have predicted this for awhile and NetApp was at the forefront of this wave when we began shipping SAS drives in our FAS2000 Series a couple years ago. We are simply continuing this leadership trend with the new DS4243 disk shelf.
-- Steve Bohac
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