Today, most organizations believe that the data they collect and capture every day is the lifeblood of their business. Think of it as an asset that they must preserve over the years (not just for legal, regulatory, due diligence, or compliance reasons), but primarily to extract valuable intelligence to achieve better business decisions, improve organizational processes, and advance Technology, as well as maximum profitability. To achieve this value and intelligence, data must be easily accessible so that organizations can process data in real time and ensure its security and availability.
Users connect to the data center in new ways, driven by the broad availability of mobile devices. The use of the Internet is becoming more widespread, and the data generated by photos, videos, audio streams, and social networks continues to grow exponentially. Devices such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets generate most of today's data, but future data will come from autonomous vehicles, factory robots, machine sensors, drones, surveillance systems, medical equipment, and Wear IoT devices such as monitors. This has increased the market demand for cloud-based data centers and efficient storage infrastructure.
Storage devices such as solid state drives, mechanical hard drives, and tapes are widely deployed in servers and storage systems in data centers. In order to transfer data quickly, efficiently and reliably throughout the enterprise, SAS (Sequence Serial Attached SCSI) based storage devices are ideal. This point-to-point interconnect protocol serially transfers data, supports multipath I/O and provides faster data throughput than the original parallel protocol. Its interfaces, infrastructure, and command set are clearly defined, robust, and reliable.
The world's top storage product manufacturers continue to deploy flash-based SAS SSD drives because SAS offers different advantages and capabilities than other active storage protocols, and rumors about the demise of SAS are overstated.
SAS overview
SAS is a point-to-point serial storage drive interconnect protocol built on the solid-state parallel SCSI interface that was replaced in the mid-1980s. This is the standard drive interface in today's storage applications. As shown in Table 1, the development of SAS is determined by the amount of data that a given protocol successfully moves from one location to another. The next generation of SAS will have backward compatibility with SAS 2 and SAS 3 versions.
The SAS interface was developed and maintained by the T10 Technical Committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).
The main advantages of SAS
The SAS interface typically connects a host bus adapter (HBA) or a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) card to a set of enterprise SSD or HDD drives to collect, store, and protect data while ensuring that it is available when needed. RAID can mirror data from one storage disk to another, or spread it across multiple hard disks. If a power outage or system failure affects the SAS drive, you can insert a new SAS drive into the chassis near the failed drive. The RAID array copies the data to the spare hard drive and replaces the failed hard drive. Then reassemble the data using the RAID algorithm and parity data to rebuild the new hard drive. This level of data redundancy is a major benefit for IT professionals.
A single SAS HBA card can use up to 24 hard drives in a combination of HDD drives or SSD drives in a single storage system. SAS RAID cards can support the same number of hard drives and a large number of RAID-level drives for better performance and data protection. By combining SSD hard drive performance with HDD hard drive capacity, data centers can make better use of storage resources.
The SAS protocol also supports high availability through dual port functionality, enabling two physical data paths in a single host. Both controllers can access the same SAS drive at the same time. If the data path is lost, the available data path continues to run as if there was no failure, thus minimizing the impact on quality of service (QoS). To support the 124 JBOD configuration with terabytes of hard drives, it is wise to use dual ports and RAID. Currently only SAS drives can provide mature dual port capabilities.
If the SAS hard disk fails, the user can hot swap and easily maintain the storage device without taking the node (server) offline. In addition, since HDD hard disks and SSD hard disks use the same SAS interface, users can easily combine SAS-based HDD hard disks and SSD hard disks in the same storage cabinet.
Energy efficiency is another benefit of SAS-based storage devices. Some SAS solid state drives have optional options that can reduce power if performance requirements are lower. Users may sometimes not be able to take full advantage of the SAS SSD hard drive performance in their storage systems; in these cases, the SAS protocol allows them to reduce power and unlock the full performance potential of the hard drive. For example, Western Digital supports 9W, 11W, and 14W power options in its latest SAS-based Ultrastar SS300 SSD drive family.
Future features of SAS
3D NAND (Vertically Stacked Memory Cell) flash provides higher storage density in the same physical space than 2D NAND flash. In the 2D NAND architecture, the U.2 (2.5-inch) specification supports up to 8TB of storage capacity. In the 3D NAND architecture, the storage capacity is larger so that the future capacity can reach 60TB or higher. From a performance perspective, the space between each memory cell in a 3D NAND architecture is larger than in 2D NAND, enabling storage devices to better write data. The larger the space of the storage unit, the less the running noise and mutual interference are, so that the data is provided with higher reliability.
As SSD drives reach 12Gbps SAS performance, the industry is planning to introduce the next-generation SAS Gen4 version, enabling SSD plants to deliver 24 Gbps of data throughput (expected 2019/2020). This release will also be backward compatible with 6 Gbps Gen2 and 12 Gbps Gen3 to better protect customers' initial SAS SSD hard drive investments.
Conclusion
IT departments must manage the rapidly growing data in the enterprise. Some companies have implemented data center consolidation projects to reduce cost and power consumption while improving performance, security, and operational efficiency. SAS-based infrastructure and device definitions are clear, stable, field-proven, and reliable when assessing their data access and storage challenges. Driven by high bandwidth and proven enterprise capabilities, SAS-compliant hard drives will not be phased out for at least the next 10 years.
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