Is SATA ready for the enterprise?Storage accounts for a significant portion of total IT infrastructure costs. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Krishna Chandler, senior analyst, storage, at iSuppli, "Storage hardware accounts for between 45 and 75 percent of IT hardware spending annually, depending on the nature of the company and how effectively it manages data." The sheer size of this expense coupled with increasing demands placed on storage systems by government regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website, Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when (HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996, Public Law 104-191) Also known as the "Kennedy-Kassebaum Act," this U.S. law protects employees' health insurance coverage when they change or lose their jobs (Title I) and provides standards for patient health, ) and Sarbanes Oxley, has the prudent storage manager implementing an Information Lifecycle Management Information Lifecycle Management refers to a wide-ranging set of strategies for administering storage systems on computing devices. Specifically, four categories of storage strategies may be considered under the auspices of ILM. (ILM) program with a multi-tiered storage infrastructure. Today there are new options available for scalable, reliable, high-performance storage that will help storage managers meet ever-expanding storage requirements. The 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. 2.5 specification was recently released and with new features such as Native Command Queuing The ability to store multiple commands and execute them one at a time. , 3Gb/s transfer rates, Port Multiplication, and Port Selection, SATA RAID holds great promise for the enterprise. A SATA RAID implementation costs a fraction of 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. or FC-$1.05 per GB for SATA versus $5.50/GB for FC and $5.15/GB for SCSI. With SATA II See SATA. products on the horizon IT managers searching for high-performance, scalable, reliable and redundant technology will undoubtedly turn to SATA solutions. But is SATA ready for the enterprise? ILM and Tiered-Storage Architecture The process of evaluating and prioritizing the company's data using an ILM strategy leads to the obvious conclusion of a tiered storage A data storage system made up of two or more types of storage based on their access speed. For example, magnetic disk and tape or magnetic disk and optical disc are widely used in a tiered storage system. See HSM. architecture where data is stored based on requirements related to performance, availability and economics. For most companies cost savings can be achieved by implementing a storage architecture that consists of three basic levels: Tier 1 Online -- mission-critical, transaction based, continuous access, high value data, maximum security and availability, must be redundant Tier 2 Near-line -- application based, active to infrequent use, medium to high value data, reliability and availability are important, redundancy required for recovery purposes Tier 3 Off-line -- archives, infrequent access, low priority in business operations Business operations are those activities involved in the running of a business for the purpose of producing value for the stakeholders. Compare business processes. The outcome of business operations is the harvesting of value from assets , data organization important for easy access when required, disk-to-disk back-up and tape archives SATA RAID provides the performance and availability required for Tier 2 (near-line) storage at the most attractive cost per MB. SATA is also the best choice for Tier 3 (off-line) given the need that government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA have imposed on search and retrieval of company records containing both structured and unstructured data Data that does not reside in fixed locations. Free-form text in a word processing document is a typical example. Contrast with structured data. See free-form database. . But again, is SATA suitable for enterprise applications? The answer is yes. This is not to say that SATA is a storage panacea, ready to take on enterprise storage requirements across the board. SCSI and Fibre Channel remain the preferred technology for transaction processing Updating the appropriate database records as soon as a transaction (order, payment, etc.) is entered into the computer. It may also imply that confirmations are sent at the same time. Transaction processing systems are the backbone of an organization because they update constantly. , but there is much broader application for SATA than ever before. Evaluating Data Center Requirements In order to determine where SATA is best suited in the data center we must analyze the applications, their role in the enterprise, and the data/information they produce. Traditionally mission-critical applications are defined as those applications where downtime, or faulty execution, may have catastrophic results for the company. Malfunctions with these applications could lead to loss of revenue, an inability to conduct business, or operational breakdowns which hinder the company's ability to manufacture, deliver and/or support products. The IT department is judged based on application availability and response time. If any application goes down it's a reflection on the IT department's ability to maintain any of the company's applications, including mission-critical systems. In order to maximize performance and availability while maintaining storage costs, IT managers should develop a process for prioritizing applications based on business criticality and the impact of the application and its data on company operations. Two areas to consider when evaluating your applications for storage cost savings are: * Can the application itself be offloaded to SATA RAID? Is it truly a Tier-1 mission-critical transaction based application? * Can the data of a Tier 1 application be moved to SATA RAID for use and analysis? How frequently can this download occur (freeing up space on the existing Tier 1 storage subsystem The part of a computer system that provides the storage. It includes the controller and disk drives. See storage system. )? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Moving the Application or the Information SATA has not been considered for enterprise class applications up to this point because performance, reliability and ruggedness of the drives could not match that of SCSI and Fibre Channel. Within the last year all of this changed. MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) The average time a component works without failure. It is the number of failures divided by the hours under observation. MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures hours of SATA drives are now a minimum of 600,000 with some drives exceeding one million hours. Rotational speeds are at 7,200-10,000rpm. As such, there is little question that SATA should be playing a larger role in the data center. The new opportunity for SATA emerges where the line blurs between on-line Tier 1 storage and near-line Tier 2 storage, and in the management of all data (Tier 1 and Tier 2). SATA RAID Controllers--Ready for the Enterprise Not every SATA configuration is appropriate for high-end storage. Many SATA drives and controllers are specifically designed to accommodate the requirements and price point of workstations and departmental servers. But today you will find SATA drives matching the performance of SCSI and SATA RAID controllers with features specifically designed for managing enterprise storage environments. For on-line and near-line storage choose a SATA controller designed for enterprise RAID. The controller will reveal the broad differences in SATA configurations and the lack of difference between enterprise SATA RAID and traditional Tier 1 solutions. At the high end, SATA RAID controllers offer the latest in RAID functionality, advanced performance features and management systems that make the lives of storage managers easier. Examples of features that are available on high-end SATA RAID controllers are: * RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 5, 50 * 4.8TB array capacity per controller * Up to 256 MB of ECC (1) (Error-Correcting Code) A type of memory that corrects errors on the fly. See ECC memory. (2) (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) A public key cryptography method that provides fast decryption and digital signature processing. protected SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) A type of dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory chip that has been widely used since the late 1990s. SDRAM chips eliminated wait states by dividing the chip into two cell blocks and interleaving data between them. * Battery backup * Write journaling for protection of drive write caching * Online capacity expansion to grow total capacity easily * Bootable array support for greater fault tolerance * Variable stripe size for performance tuning by application * Multiple array background initialization in·i·tial·ize tr.v. in·i·tial·ized, in·i·tial·iz·ing, in·i·tial·iz·es Computer Science 1. To set (a starting value of a variable). 2. To prepare (a computer or a printer) for use; boot. 3. for immediate data redundancy * Host controller and drive command queuing for peak performance * Hot-Plug, Hot-Swap and Hot-Spare capability SATA II Performance In addition to these advanced features, the introduction of SATA II products brings a number of key performance improvements, including 3Gb/second interface speed, Native Command Queuing (NCQ NCQ Native Command Queuing ), and Port Multiplier capability. These performance enhancements put SATA II in the same performance classification as SCSI. In fact the SATA RAID feature set is the same as that of SCSI. SATA II is designed for scalability and is actually more scalable than its SCSI counterpart. Port Multiplier enables 15 drives to be connected to a single SATA controller. This is similar to USB USB in full Universal Serial Bus Type of serial bus that allows peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, digitizers, data gloves, etc.) to be easily connected to a computer. connectivity, but with the performance benefits of an aggregated switch. Performance doubts about SATA are put to rest not only with a 3Gb/second access rate and the Port Multiplier function, but also with Native Command Queuing. Commonly seen with Fibre Channel and SCSI, NCQ uses an algorithm to determine the most efficient order to execute commands that creates the least mechanical overhead-minimizing the number of 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 interrupts a server makes on the drive when carrying out multiple commands. The server is able to complete 32 commands without interruption for increased SATA performance and efficiency. SATA II Availability There is no room for compromise when it comes to data availability--no matter what the application, SATA RAID controllers offer the latest data availability features including failover capability with port selectors to handle failures in the data path. A port selector is a component that enables redundant data paths in the event of a failure. Two initiator ports connect to the same SATA device. If the primary or active initiator goes down, the standby initiator can signal the port-selector to make the standby port the new active port thus allowing it to control the device. Port selectors can be attached to Port Multipliers in order to provide redundant paths between separate devices. In Conclusion--Consider SATA When it comes to high end workstations or high-performance, cost-effective storage for near-line and off-line storage, SATA offers what storage managers need to manage their company's information. With the advent of SATA II products, SATA RAID is an intelligent option for Tier 1 data and some mission-critical applications. When developing your tiered-storage architecture consider the broad role that SATA can play. Michael Joyce is director of marketing at AMCC AMCC Applied Micro Circuits Corporation AMCC Air Mobility Control Center AMCC Ashore Mobile Contingency Communications AMCC Advanced Materials Commercialization Center AMCC allied movement coordination center (US DoD) Storage, San Diego, CA www.amcc.com |
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