Scaling the SAS learning curve
Adaptec starts its SAS campaign with new products and a few tools to educate the masses
Follow @infoworldAside from the SNW Fall and the Storage Decisions conferences I mentioned last week, another major October storage show opened its doors this month: the London-based Storage Expo. For U.S-based storage mavens, it's a show worth visiting because many storage vendors rehearse demos of new products there before an official launch in the States.
I missed the show this year, but a few vendors kept me fed with news from across the pond, and it was certainly interesting. For example, all Penguin enthusiasts should know that Broadcom was showing off a new PCIe (PCI Express) RAID controller supporting both SATA and SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives, running on a Linux server.
Broadcom's announcement joins a long spiel of news focused on SAS, the new reincarnation of SCSI, and came only days before Adaptec unleashed a small torrent of new SAS products, including HBAs, RAID controllers, and disk enclosures.
"We have been shipping SAS products to other vendors for a long time," says Tim Connolly, vice president of Adaptec Data Protection Solutions Group, mentioning IBM as an example of one of those "other vendors." However, the products in these particular SAS announcements target not only other vendors but also large-enterprise and small-business customers.
Take, for example, the $360 eight-port 48300, a PCI-X HBA that mounts one external and one internal four-device connector. In plain English, with this HBA your high-end desktop can mount as many as four SAS or SATA drives inside and connect four more from an outside box.
Don't feel bad if that "one external and one internal four-device connector" sounds like a riddle, because we all need to learn new tricks with SAS. Here's some help from Adaptec in the form of a poster explaining common SAS connectivity that you can download as a PDF file -- or have a paper copy shipped to you (shipping is free, but requires registration).
Turning back to the 48300, you can implement software RAID 0, 1, and 10 or address each drive individually -- and it runs on most major OSes, except for Unix (at least for now).
Need more enterprise-class punch for your servers? The PCI-X 4800 or the PCIe 4805 offer fully featured, hardware-based RAID for eight internal (or four internal plus four external) SAS/SATA drives.
The price is higher, at $945 for the PCI-X and $995 for the PCIe, but the two cards offer some interesting features, including array capacity of as much as 512GB, the ability to change a LUN (logical unit number) capacity or RAID level online and to make full use of disks with different capacities, and the ability to create multiple LUNs on the same drives.
By purchasing the Advanced Data Protection Suite (price to be announced by the end of the year), you can add more jaw-dropping features to those two cards, such as RAID 6, which enables survival of two consecutive disk failures, online backup to disk or tape of volume snapshots, and access distribution across spare drives.
