Although Serial Attached small computer system interface (SCSI) disk drives and interfaces are not yet a reality, five disk drive manufacturers – Adaptec Inc., Fujitsu Inc., Hitachi Ltd., Maxtor Corp. and Seagate – on Monday announced they will be working together to ensure their Serial Attached SCSI products will be interoperable.
SCSI is an electronic computer standard that allows computers to communicate with peripheral devices such as disk drives, CD-ROM drives, printers, tape drives and scanners. SCSI interfaces are currently deployed in a parallel fashion, but this new industry initiative is working towards changing the way SCSI is deployed – to a serial attached format.
In addition to working together to drive adoption of this technology, the companies involved would also collaborate on co-marketing activities such as demonstrating prototypes, speaking at trade shows, writing white papers on Serial Attached SCSI solutions, holding seminars and Webcasts.
Linus Wong, director of strategic marketing, storage solutions division at Adaptec, a storage solutions company in Milpitas, Calif., said Serial Attached SCSI is a natural evolution from its currently deployed counterpart, Parallel SCSI, and will be on the market in about 12 months.
“SCSI has doubled in performance every couple of years in the past five to 10 years – we’re on our seventh generation of SCSI at 320MB/sec,” Wong explained. “But each of those transitions have gotten more and more difficult – it gets harder and harder to go faster and faster. So Serial technologies in general allow you to break down that barrier and allow you to make a leap to that next generation technology.”
Wong also sits on the board of the SCSI Trade Association (STA), an industry group based in San Francisco, that drives positioning and standards around SCSI. He said the STA has abandoned plans for what would have been the next generation of Parallel SCSI – Ultra-640 – and is now focusing on Serial Attached SCSI which would initially reach speeds of 1.5Gbps.
“In the parallel technology you’re sending multiple bits down the wire at the same time, and they all have to get there at the same time and be clocked at the same time. So as you go faster and faster it becomes almost impossible to get all those bits to line up,” Wong explained. “At the current generation of SCSI there are six bits on the wire at the same time – that’s how fast they’re moving at the wire – so to get those to line up and arrive at the other side of the cable at exactly at the same time is very difficult.”
But with Serial Attached SCSI one bit is sent at a time, so there is no need to worry about clocking or skew compensation – that’s why Wong says these faster speeds can be attained. In addition to the higher bandwidth, Serial Attached SCSI devices will also be able to transmit data over large geographic distances.
Parallel SCSI can only address a limited number of devices and has performance as well as distance limitations plus large connectors that make it unsuitable for some dense computing environments.
Wong says Serial Attached SCSI disk drives can be attached to many devices, while Parallel SCSI drives, because they share a bus, can only be attached to about 15 devices.
“Because [Serial Attached SCSI] is a point-to-point technology, each device has a dedicated link, you can fan out to many more devices,” Wong said. “So, from a spec point of view it’s tens of thousands, but for all practical purpose the limit is probably 120 to 256 devices.”
One drawback is there will be no compatibility with Serial Attached SCSI devices to Parallel SCSI drives. However, Wong said when the technology hits the streets included will be bridges that can span Serial Attached SCSI and Parallel SCSI environments.
This means a user would have to invest in new hardware to make the transition from Parallel to Serial Attached SCSI, but Wong said the software needed to administer these two different environments would be the same. Only minor adjustments in modifying Parallel SCSI protocols to Serial Attached SCSI protocols would be required.
In addition, from a standards perspective, Wong said the T10 Technical Committee, a group part of the InterNational Committee on Information Technology Standards (INCITS) that has defined standards for Parallel SCSI is also working on developing standards for Serial Attached SCSI.
Another benefit, Wong said, is that Serial Attached SCSI interface supports both to Serial Attached SCSI disk drives and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drives.
Like Serial Attached SCSI, SATA is a relatively new technology – Wong says the first products are just starting to ship now – and is slated to replace Parallel ATA disk drives such as integrated drive electronics (IDE), enhanced IDE (EIDE) and UDMA 66, usually seen on the desktop environment. With SATA, users can get faster speeds than with Parallel ATA, and, enterprises are showing interest in deploying them in a server environment in lieu of SCSI drives for storing reference data because ATA drives are less expensive.
Unlike transactional data, which is constantly being accessed and requires updating in real-time, reference data doesn’t change and isn’t accessed often, so Wong said. enterprises don’t mind compromising speed for cost-savings in this instance. While ATA drives don’t perform as well as SCSI drives, Wong said this could be partially compensated for by Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) software and SATA disk drives are ideal for storing reference data.
“[The industry is] positioning those as an alternative to tape drives, or at least a staging between tape and disk because it’s less expensive,” said Alan Freedman, research manager, infrastructure hardware with IDC Canada Ltd. in Toronto. “You don’t get quite the performance [as SCSI] although I don’t think there’s a huge decrease anymore. But…especially for things like fixed content which is going to change a lot and which you don’t need to recall all that often, this is a good option.”
Wong said the fact that Serial Attached SCSI interfaces will be interoperable with both Serial Attached SCSI disk drives and SATA disk drives would allow not only enterprises to be flexible in their storage deployments, but allow OEMs and resellers to do the same.
Freedman said this is yet another option for people to prioritize their data storage needs.
“It gives them the chance to create a storage infrastructure that is properly aligned with their business initiatives and that enables them to save money while getting the performance that’s necessary,” Freedman said. “It’s not always about getting top performance, it’s about getting the performance that you need.”
Adaptec is online at www.adaptec.com while Fujitsu is based in Kawasaki, Japan is online at www.fujitsu.com. Singapore-based Hitachi is on the Web at www.hitachi.com, and Maxtor, based in Milpitas, Calif., has information available at www.maxtor.com. Seagate is in Scotts Valley, Calif. and is online at www.seagate.com.
For more material about the SCSI Trade Association T10 Technical Committee visit www.scsita.org and www.t10.org respectively.