Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
Access "Mixing SAS, SATA prompts caution"
This article is part of the Vol. 5 No. 10 December 2006 issue of The hottest storage technology for 2007
Enterprise-class scalability and performance at desktop-like prices is the promise offered by intermixing serial-attached SCSI (SAS) and SATA. But when these drives are mixed in the same enclosure, interoperability issues can arise, forcing vendors to carefully manage their SAS/SATA implementations. One problem is that SATA and SAS have different voltage levels. SATA was designed for internal use in servers and PCs with cables of up to one meter in length; SAS supports distances of up to 10 meters, says Joel Warford, VP, marketing and business development at SiliconStor, a semiconductor company in Fremont, CA. "Since SATA is not adept at driving a signal over this longer distance, data integrity issues can result," he says. To boost SATA's voltage level, storage arrays such as Dot Hill's 2730 use SiliconStor interposers. The interposer resides between the SATA drive and the SAS backplane and, notes Warford, "boosts the signal, so it can accept a signal in a degraded form and also send out an amplified signal back to the subsystem." Further, SAS drives offer ... Access >>>
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What's Inside
Features
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- Vendors split on strategies for key management
- New rules impact storage procedures
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SAN consolidation strategies
As islands of SANs proliferate in companies, the cost of storage can soar. Sound SAN design strategies allow companies to reduce the number of SAN islands, strengthen a primary SAN, make storage easier to manage and provide more data protection.
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Configuring storage for ERP
The "crown jewels" of corporate data are typically maintained within enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. But for many storage managers, ERP is a minefield of critical information and competing priorities. In this first installment of a three-part series, we look at ways to protect ERP data while improving performance.
- Virtualization may cure provisioning woes
- Users want more from tiered storage
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- Mixing SAS, SATA prompts caution
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Hot technologies for 2007
"Storage" magazine's editors reviewed technology developments, product introductions and storage standards to come up with this short list of must-have technologies for 2007. We believe iSCSI SANs, hardware-based tape encryption, high-capacity disk drives, virtualization and thin provisioning will have the greatest impact on enterprise storage environments.
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Quality awards II: EqualLogic named top midrange array
by Rich Castagna and Phil Goodwin, Storage magazine
Another Quality Awards dark-horse candidate, EqualLogic PS Series, joins backup winner BakBone in unseating established players for top honors.
- Mobile drive tech could move into data center
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Host-based replication
There are three distinct architectures of host-level replication software: Windows-only file system, multi-OS file system and multi-OS blocklevel products. Each alternative offers specific features that make it a better fit for some types of data protection.
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Snapshot: Continuous data protection
Is CDP part of your backup?
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Columns
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Recent storage company IPOs remind us that fast and loose spending isn't behind us
Storage Bin: Just when we thought the fast and loose spending of the dot-com bubble was well behind us, a few recent storage company IPOs remind us that we really haven't gotten a lot smarter.
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Waste millions of dollars or start archiving
Waste millions of dollars or start archiving
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Data backup versus data archiving
Companies should split backup and archiving into two separate initiatives to help them differentiate between copying data for recovery, and retaining data for future reference and retrieval.
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Is it really a disaster?
Was it really a disaster after all? It's important to distinguish operational recovery from disaster recovery because the tools and techniques used in each situation can differ significantly.
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Recent storage company IPOs remind us that fast and loose spending isn't behind us
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