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SAS starter kit: mixing SAS and SATA drives in a single enclosure.

Article Excerpt
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) has begun to play a key role as the enterprise continues to move towards more optimized, cost-effective storage platforms. Overcoming many of the limitations of traditional parallel SCSI implementations, SAS solutions that offer connectivity choices and support both SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) drive technology enable enterprises to easily create tiered storage environments. However, concerns about performance expectations and Rotational Vibration Interference (RVI) in mixed SAS/SATA environments are preventing many organizations from adopting SAS technology.

SAS is the latest storage interconnect technology based on the venerable SCSI protocol; it is based on a switch based storage fabric that supports high performance, SAS and high value SATA disk drives. Initially focused on the server and direct attached storage market, SAS took the best from SCSI, Fibre Channel and iSCSI, then added additional features to produce a high speed, switch based, flexible, standards based, storage interconnect technology.

Technology Comparison

The most common disk connect technology today is PATA (Parallel ATA). Until recently PATA was found in every PC although, like SCSI, PATA is now being replaced with a high speed serial interconnect--Serial ATA. Basic SATA has very limited networking and no HA (high availability) features, this limits its usefulness in business applications. However, SATA disk drives, connected to a host through a SAS expander based infrastructure, can be a very effective implementation for today's business applications.

Below is a quick summary of key features...

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