Dining out with SATA: guess who's coming to dinner?Good evening, my friends, and welcome to Chez chez prep. At the home of; at or by. [French, from Old French, from Latin casa, cottage, hut.] chez prep at the home of [French] High End, the data storage dining choice of the rich and famous. As you will discover, our menu is capable of being custom tailored to your particular taste desires. With all the necessary ingredients, our chef, along with his expert staff, will be happy to prepare any dish to satisfy even your most eclectic whim whim n. 1. A sudden or capricious idea; a fancy. 2. Arbitrary thought or impulse: governed by whim. 3. A vertical horse-powered drum used as a hoist in a mine. . Or you may choose from one of our many house specialties, including such elite offerings as a fine Roast Rack of RAID-50 for the heartiest of appetites. Or, perhaps the complex subtleties of a RAID V Souffle souffle /souf·fle/ (soo´f'l) a soft, blowing auscultatory sound. cardiac souffle any cardiac or vascular murmur of a blowing quality. would be more to your liking this evening. And may we also recommend a bottle of the previous decade's finest wine from the massively expensive "Controller Vineyards" to delicately complement your meal. While you decide, we'll be delighted to spin up a fresh SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. salad or perhaps a delightful Fibre appetizer for the table. Finally, don't forget that any meal of this caliber is not complete without the finest of desserts. Your waiter will be happy to review our 'tape of choices' as you prepare to wrap up a truly exquisite meal. Remember, the evening is yours to enjoy and price is rarely a consideration here at Chez High End. An analogy perhaps too typical of the data storage environment found at many of the top corporate players. Selections of only the highest performance devices, varying levels of security, redundancy, availability, and all at a cost to match. But here you are in the Small to Medium Business (SMB (1) (Small to Medium-sized Business) Also called "SME" (small to medium-sized enterprise), it refers to companies that are larger than the small office/home office (SOHO), but not huge. ) space. Or, even worse, the manager of a workgroup within a large corporation who is bound by dwindling dwin·dle v. dwin·dled, dwin·dling, dwin·dles v.intr. To become gradually less until little remains. v.tr. To cause to dwindle. See Synonyms at decrease. departmental budgets or cast out to a remote location where issue of performance rarely appear on the scopes of the upper level I/S I/S Information Systems I/S Income Statement masters. You are stuck in the fast food jungle of ATA (1) (AT Attachment) The specification for IDE drives. See IDE. (2) See analog telephone adapter. ATA - Advanced Technology Attachment or Serial ATA See SATA. Serial ATA - Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA (Serial ATA) A serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been the de facto standard hard disk interface for desktop PCs for more than two decades. The original Parallel ATA (PATA) interface was launched in 1986. ). This is a world served by lowly "desktop" disk drives and minimally performing disk controllers that present only a small fraction of the features available at the finer data establishments. You are, in fact, dining at the SMB I/S Cafeteria where pre-formed beef by-product by·prod·uct or by-prod·uct n. 1. Something produced in the making of something else. 2. A secondary result; a side effect. by-product Noun 1. patties and brown sticks resembling either a potato or fish-based item are the only offerings. True, it's inexpensive and you won't starve starve v. 1. To suffer or die from extreme or prolonged lack of food. 2. To deprive of food so as to cause suffering or death. to death--but wouldn't it be nice if you could eat the Ritz Carlton data protection and performance buffet while enjoying the price and ease of ordering found at the corner diner diner, restaurant resembling the railroad dining car that is its source. In the mid-19th cent., the first dining cars that appeared on trains were nothing more than an empty car with a fastened-down table. George M. ? The reality of the introductory scenario has become far too familiar for SMBs or the smaller departmental workgroups previously mentioned. In short, performance and related features have always come with an associated cost to purchase and operate that was beyond the reach of smaller organizations. Three converging entrees are making the Perfect Meal available to you: high reliability Serial ATA drives,processor-less SATA RAID controllers A disk controller card that supports one or more RAID configurations. Originally only for SCSI drives, RAID controllers have become very popular for PATA and SATA drives. See RAID. , and feature-rich and easy to use multi-level RAID software. With reduced access times, low rotational latencies rotational latency - The time for the start of the required sector on a disk to appear underneath the read/write head. The worst case is where it has just passed the head when the request is received. , increased interface bandwidths along with caching and queuing capabilities, these solutions have stepped up to the 'A' list. SATA drives now enjoy the capability of being integrated into RAID configurations traditionally reserved for only the higher end Coordinates: For other places with the same name, see Billinge. Higher End or Billinge Higher End is a district of the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan, in Greater Manchester, England. or 'server class' applications. The whole movement is being driven by several factors, the most prominent of which is cost of implementation and operation. The enabling factor in the equation is the notion of creating controllers which have the ability to run multiple disks (more than the usual two run by a chip embedded Inserted into. See embedded system. on the motherboard) and a software stack (1) A stack that is implemented in memory rather than in hardware registers. See stack. (2) A generic reference to a set of system programs or a set of application programs that form a complete system. See stack. that doesn't bog down bog down Verb [bogging, bogged] to impede physically or mentally Verb 1. bog down - get stuck while doing something; "She bogged down many times while she wrote her dissertation" bog low to midrange midrange Epidemiology The halfway point or midpoint in a set of observations; for most data, MR is calculated as the sum of the smallest observation and the largest observation, divided by 2; for age data, one is added to the numerator; a midrange is usually enterprise server CPU's. The kind of servers that are having their CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. taste buds taste buds taste npl → Geschmacksknospen pl assailed by less than eloquent application packages and bombarded by the continual onslaught of an increasing user base--all while maintaining compliance to the ultimate SMB I/S mandate to do more with less. A different view is that environments of this type are of commonly serviced by branded Intel platforms or 'white boxes' typically provided by a channel network of various distributors, VARs, and resellers. In the entry to midrange Enterprise world, these platforms more often than not are running Microsoft O/S and application packages--hence the term "WinTel." The intent is not to label this as a bad concept, but perhaps viewed as Bill G's Pizza attempting to slay slay tr.v. slew , slain , slay·ing, slays 1. To kill violently. 2. past tense and past participle often slayed Slang the Unix Goliath prevalent in the Enterprise world. Hence an ongoing struggle to achieve absolute maximum performance for minimal dollars. A noble battle to be sure. What all of this has done is to justify the use of another increasingly familiar term: 'underserved market.' Studies, polls and surveys by organizations such as the U.S. Census Bureau Noun 1. Census Bureau - the bureau of the Commerce Department responsible for taking the census; provides demographic information and analyses about the population of the United States Bureau of the Census , IDC, Gartner, and Glasshouse Technologies currently indicate that this market represents 765,000 companies who have between 5 and 99 employees and generate from $1M to $50M in revenue annually. These companies also have a very real need for true multilevel mul·ti·lev·el adj. Having several levels: a multilevel parking garage. Adj. 1. multilevel - of a building having more than one level RAID solutions. This market, or demand segment, resides just below the "higher end" occupied by the likes of EMC (1) (EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA, www.emc.com) The leading supplier of storage products for midrange computers and mainframes. Founded in 1979 by Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino, EMC has developed advanced storage and retrieval technologies for the world's largest companies. , Hitachi Data Systems See HDS. , HP, Sun Storage and so on. To date, these sophisticated players have occupied the upper region of the typical market layer pyramid The Layer Pyramid (known locally in Arabic as Haram el-Meduwara, Arabic: هرم المدورة, or Round Pyramid) is located in the necropolis of Zawyet el'Aryan. . Very recently, a few of the major players have given the nod to NTA NTA National Tour Association NTA Nitrilotriacetic Acid NTA National Treatment Agency (for Substance Misuse; UK) NTA Net Tangible Asset NTA National Tutoring Association NTA National Transportation Agency by including them as options in some of their products. EMC, Spinnaker Networks, Network Appliance (1) A specialized device for use on a network. For example, Web servers, cache servers and file servers can be implemented as general-purpose computers with the appropriate software or as network appliances, which are computers dedicated to a single function and cannot do anything and Blue Arc Blue Arc may refer to
What is really happening with desktop technology products and which features are truly available should be the subject of some careful homework. There are a fair number of ATA controller providers out there. The offerings range from the extremely inexpensive (cheap and feature starved starve v. starved, starv·ing, starves v.intr. 1. To suffer or die from extreme or prolonged lack of food. 2. Informal To be hungry. 3. To suffer from deprivation. ) to other more modestly priced packages. Certain solutions command premiums, yet are able to offer some number of features while still managing to keep cost within range. It is also important to keep in mind that, in most cases, once a particular controller is selected the choice has been made and life will be governed by that controller's particular feature sets and inherent limitations. Again, price and your ability to operate a given storage solution most often establishes related purchasing activities as well as implementation budgets and guidelines. Obviously, increasing the number of features, expandability, levels of data security/redundancy, levels of performance, on-the-fly capabilities, etc., will affect the ultimate cost of ownership and add increased spin to the ROI (Return On Investment) The monetary benefits derived from having spent money on developing or revising a system. In the IT world, there are more ways to compute ROI than Carter has liver pills (and for those of you who never heard of that expression, it means a lot). modeling process. Two significant considerations are commonly overlooked, however: the ease of initial deployment and the product's future upgrade or expansion capabilities. These two areas can incur huge costs and inconvenience to users (lost productivity) not to mention the potential of having to buy additional hardware or software. Any requirements for system downtime The time during which a computer is not functioning due to hardware, operating system or application program failure. in order to affect upgrades can also bc critical down the road. In many cases, the increase of system capacity, redefinition of RAID levels, or the installation of mixed capacity drives (if this feature is supported) requires that all of the data be backed up offline while the storage system is reconfigured. In short, stepping up to true RAID features can be an exciting performance advantage or a massive case of indigestion indigestion or dyspepsia, discomfort during or after eating caused by some interference with the normal digestive process. Symptoms include nausea, heartburn, abdominal pain, gas distress, and a feeling of abdominal distention. . In an ideal world, a "solution" combining hardware and software can be the most effective route. Let's say an 8-port card, which comes with feature rich software allowing easy, non-business interfering operation of most frequently performed tasks--Online Array Create/Delete, Online Capacity Expansion, and Online RAID Level Migration. While this sounds like a mouthful, these features delivered in an intuitive way and not requiring system reboots, is the Ritz Carlton menu at diner prices. Additional capabilities such as Controller Spanning and Distributed Sparing let you expand your arrays across controllers and utilize all the spindles while maintaining data integrity and performance. Support of Command Queuing The ability to store multiple commands and execute them one at a time. en the newly released SATA drives and PCI-X (PCI eXtended) An enhanced PCI bus technology originally developed by IBM, HP and Compaq that is backward compatible with existing PCI cards. PCI and 32-bit PCI-X slots are physically the same, and PCI cards can plug into PCI-X slots. support allows you to have your cake and eat it too. And all this without a snooty wine steward (IT guru) looking down on you while he's collecting a big paycheck. In all, a product set with a combination of embedded features such as these would be very desirable, to understate un·der·state v. un·der·stat·ed, un·der·stat·ing, un·der·states v.tr. 1. To state with less completeness or truth than seems warranted by the facts. 2. the notion. Simply buying a 4-port controller card with 'a couple of drivers' probably won't get the job done. Be certain that the controller package you settle on provides all of the appropriate features for easily getting you up and running to expectation. Also make certain that it is able to keep you there over time. And what about these commodity 'non server' drives? Why would anyone consider a commodity, SATA, desktop disk drive for introduction into a space which has historically been reserved only for those which spin the fastest, boast incredible access times and unfathomable MBTF MBTF Mean Time Between Failures (computer hardware) figures? Think about it. RAID involves taking advantage of economies of scale. When a database application begins to bog down due to advanced user load, additional spindles are added to increase I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output throughput. The speed of the individual drives is not increased. The data is simply spread over a wider range of spindles allowing more heads to locate data in less time (yes, two heads are truly better than one). Similarly, when data redundancy Writing data to two or more locations for backup and data recovery. For example, data can be stored on two or more disks or disk and tape or disk and the Internet. See disk redundancy and data recovery. , availability, reliability or hot swapping (hardware) hot swapping - The connection and disconnection of peripherals or other components without interrupting system operation. This facility may have design implications for both hardware and software. is desirable, the more the merrier. It's what RAID is all about. What most people don't realize--due to previous, and some not so subliminal subliminal /sub·lim·i·nal/ (-lim´i-n'l) below the threshold of sensation or conscious awareness. sub·lim·i·nal adj. 1. Below the threshold of conscious perception. Used of stimuli. programming by the high-end guys--is that an ever increasing number of the SATA drive suppliers continue to add a broad array of features once common only to SCSI or Fibre class disk drives. Again, do your homework. Do the drives under consideration have command queuing, SMART technology, are they parallel or serial ATA, are they hot swappable See hot swap. , and are they capable of effectively using or supporting all of the other features that your choice of controllers is able to provide? Finally, we return to another commonly visited portion section of the menu. Welcome to the "slice and dice Refers to rearranging data so that it can be viewed from different perspectives. The term is typically used with OLAP databases that present information to the user in the form of multidimensional cubes similar to a 3D spreadsheet. See OLAP. " section. Published technology "specs (SPECificationS) The details of the components built into a device. See specification. " are usually carefully stated with respect to the particular device or technology being considered so as to provide the most positive perceived impact on a specific application or environment being modified. This activity has a much shorter name spelled 'specsmanship.' It is unfair to compare SCSI RAID solutions to a SATA RAID solution and expect all of the numbers to come out looking the same. If that were the case, the SCSI controller A common term for a SCSI host adapter. See SCSI. SCSI controller - SCSI adaptor folks wouldn't be able to command the premier pricing for their devices, nor would the high-end drive manufacturers. It simply wouldn't be an accurate apples to apples comparison. But, benchmarking has produced some surprising numbers with respect to the categories that really count! Even if we are to compare apples to oranges, the increase in all of the areas that make significant contributions to efficiency and productivity realize a tremendous, positive impact with respect to their higher end counterparts. SATA is now! So, thank you for stopping by our fine establishment for dinner. We hope you enjoyed your meal and will feel comfortable iii recommending us to all of your affluent associates. As for you folks in the SMB I/S Cafeteria, there's good news. As mentioned earlier ... you can have your cake and eat it too! Ben appetit!
RAID & visualization available market
Enterprise RAID/Virtualization
Profile: IT department, RAID staff
Vendors: Veritas, EMC, HP, Sun 10%
Mid-Market RAID/Virtualization
Provile: IT/RAID staff
Vendors: Adaptec, LSI Logic 30%
RAID/Virtualization Market
Profile: No dedicated IT/RAID staff
Vendors: No RAID5 suppliers 60%
Figure 1- Market Segment Pyramid
RAIDCore
Price $250-350
Channels 8
Online Capacity Expansion All RAID Levels (OCE) Yes
Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM) Yes
Controller Spanning Yes
RAID Levels Supported
RAID0 Yes
RAID1 Yes
RAID1n Yes
RAID0+1 Yes
RAID0+1n Yes
RAID5 Yes
RAID50 Yes
RAID 1, 1n, 0+1, 0_1n Split Yes
Drive Command Queuing Yes
Drive Roaming Yes
Cache Support
Write Through Yes
Write Back Yes
Background Array Initialization Yes
Bad Block Replacement (BBR) Yes
Highest PCI Support PCI-X
Create and Delete Without Reboot Yes
Background Consistent Check Yes
Scheduled Consistent Checks Yes
Rebuild Priority Yes
Sparing Support
Dedicated Yes
Global Yes
Distributed Yes
Multiple Array Type Per Drive Yes
Touched Region Logging Yes
EMAIL Event Notification Yes
NT Event Log Integration Yes
Instant Create Support RAID 1, 1n, 0+1, 0+1n, 5, 50 Yes
Hot Swap Support Yes
BIOS Support
Create Yes
Boot Yes
INT13 Control Yes
Operating System Support
Windows 2000 Yes
Windows XP Yes
Windows NET Yes
Linux Yes
Performance
Max Measured Transfer (MB/Sec) 747
Max Sustained Media Transfer (MB/Sec) 425
RAIDS Sequential Write (MB/Sec) 257
Max IO/sec 58500
Leading SATA
offering
Price $550-700
Channels 8
Online Capacity Expansion All RAID Levels (OCE) -
Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM) -
Controller Spanning -
RAID Levels Supported
RAID0 Yes
RAID1 Yes
RAID1n
RAID0+1 Yes
RAID0+1n -
RAID5 Yes
RAID50 -
RAID 1, 1n, 0+1, 0_1n Split -
Drive Command Queuing Yes
Drive Roaming Yes
Cache Support
Write Through Yes
Write Back Yes
Background Array Initialization Yes
Bad Block Replacement (BBR) -
Highest PCI Support 64 Bit 33 MHz
Create and Delete Without Reboot -
Background Consistent Check Yes
Scheduled Consistent Checks Yes
Rebuild Priority Yes
Sparing Support
Dedicated Yes
Global -
Distributed -
Multiple Array Type Per Drive -
Touched Region Logging -
EMAIL Event Notification Yes
NT Event Log Integration Yes
Instant Create Support RAID 1, 1n, 0+1, 0+1n, 5, 50 RAID1,RAID10 only
Hot Swap Support Yes
BIOS Support
Create Yes
Boot Yes
INT13 Control -
Operating System Support
Windows 2000 Yes
Windows XP Yes
Windows NET Yes
Linux Yes
Performance
Max Measured Transfer (MB/Sec) 182
Max Sustained Media Transfer (MB/Sec) 182
RAIDS Sequential Write (MB/Sec 71
Max IO/sec 12296
Leading SCSI
Offering
Price $675-800
Channels 2
Online Capacity Expansion All RAID Levels (OCE) Yes
Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM) Yes
Controller Spanning -
RAID Levels Supported
RAID0 Yes
RAID1 Yes
RAID1n Yes
RAID0+1 Yes
RAID0+1n -
RAID5 Yes
RAID50 Yes
RAID 1, 1n, 0+1, 0_1n Split -
Drive Command Queuing -
Drive Roaming Yes
Cache Support
Write Through Yes
Write Back Yes
Background Array Initialization Yes
Bad Block Replacement (BBR) Yes
Highest PCI Support 64 Bit 66 MHz
Create and Delete Without Reboot Yes
Background Consistent Check Yes
Scheduled Consistent Checks Yes
Rebuild Priority Yes
Sparing Support
Dedicated Yes
Global Yes
Distributed -
Multiple Array Type Per Drive Yes
Touched Region Logging -
EMAIL Event Notification Yes
NT Event Log Integration Yes
Instant Create Support RAID 1, 1n, 0+1, 0+1n, 5, 50 Yes
Hot Swap Support Yes
BIOS Support
Create Yes
Boot Yes
INT13 Control Yes
Operating System Support
Windows 2000 Yes
Windows XP Yes
Windows NET Yes
Linux Yes
Performance
Max Measured Transfer (MB/Sec) 206
Max Sustained Media Transfer (MB/Sec) 144
RAIDS Sequential Write (MB/Sec 83
Max IO/sec 61919
Figure 2- SCSI to SATA RAID Benchmark results
www.raidcore.net Brian Harding, for RAIDCore (Nashua, N.H.) |
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