Dining out with SATA: guess who's coming to dinner? - Tape/Disk/Optical Storage

Computer Technology Review, July, 2003 by Brian Harding

Good evening, my friends, and welcome to Chez High End, the data storage dining choice of the rich and famous. As you will discover, our menu is capable of being custom tailored to your particular taste desires. With all the necessary ingredients, our chef, along with his expert staff, will be happy to prepare any dish to satisfy even your most eclectic whim. Or you may choose from one of our many house specialties, including such elite offerings as a fine Roast Rack of RAID-50 for the heartiest of appetites. Or, perhaps the complex subtleties of a RAID V Souffle would be more to your liking this evening. And may we also recommend a bottle of the previous decade's finest wine from the massively expensive "Controller Vineyards" to delicately complement your meal. While you decide, we'll be delighted to spin up a fresh SCSI salad or perhaps a delightful Fibre appetizer for the table. Finally, don't forget that any meal of this caliber is not complete without the finest of desserts. Your waiter will be happy to review our 'tape of choices' as you prepare to wrap up a truly exquisite meal. Remember, the evening is yours to enjoy and price is rarely a consideration here at Chez High End.

An analogy perhaps too typical of the data storage environment found at many of the top corporate players. Selections of only the highest performance devices, varying levels of security, redundancy, availability, and all at a cost to match. But here you are in the Small to Medium Business (SMB) space. Or, even worse, the manager of a workgroup within a large corporation who is bound by dwindling departmental budgets or cast out to a remote location where issue of performance rarely appear on the scopes of the upper level I/S masters. You are stuck in the fast food jungle of ATA or Serial ATA (SATA). This is a world served by lowly "desktop" disk drives and minimally performing disk controllers that present only a small fraction of the features available at the finer data establishments. You are, in fact, dining at the SMB I/S Cafeteria where pre-formed beef by-product patties and brown sticks resembling either a potato or fish-based item are the only offerings. True, it's inexpensive and you won't starve to death--but wouldn't it be nice if you could eat the Ritz Carlton data protection and performance buffet while enjoying the price and ease of ordering found at the corner diner?

The reality of the introductory scenario has become far too familiar for SMBs or the smaller departmental workgroups previously mentioned. In short, performance and related features have always come with an associated cost to purchase and operate that was beyond the reach of smaller organizations. Three converging entrees are making the Perfect Meal available to you: high reliability Serial ATA drives,processor-less SATA RAID controllers, and feature-rich and easy to use multi-level RAID software. With reduced access times, low rotational latencies, increased interface bandwidths along with caching and queuing capabilities, these solutions have stepped up to the 'A' list. SATA drives now enjoy the capability of being integrated into RAID configurations traditionally reserved for only the higher end or 'server class' applications. The whole movement is being driven by several factors, the most prominent of which is cost of implementation and operation. The enabling factor in the equation is the notion of creating controllers which have the ability to run multiple disks (more than the usual two run by a chip embedded on the motherboard) and a software stack that doesn't bog down low to midrange enterprise server CPU's. The kind of servers that are having their CPU taste buds assailed by less than eloquent application packages and bombarded by the continual onslaught of an increasing user base--all while maintaining compliance to the ultimate SMB I/S mandate to do more with less.

A different view is that environments of this type are of commonly serviced by branded Intel platforms or 'white boxes' typically provided by a channel network of various distributors, VARs, and resellers. In the entry to midrange Enterprise world, these platforms more often than not are running Microsoft O/S and application packages--hence the term "WinTel." The intent is not to label this as a bad concept, but perhaps viewed as Bill G's Pizza attempting to slay the Unix Goliath prevalent in the Enterprise world. Hence an ongoing struggle to achieve absolute maximum performance for minimal dollars. A noble battle to be sure. What all of this has done is to justify the use of another increasingly familiar term: 'underserved market.' Studies, polls and surveys by organizations such as the U.S. Census Bureau, IDC, Gartner, and Glasshouse Technologies currently indicate that this market represents 765,000 companies who have between 5 and 99 employees and generate from $1M to $50M in revenue annually. These companies also have a very real need for true multilevel RAID solutions. This market, or demand segment, resides just below the "higher end" occupied by the likes of EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, Sun Storage and so on. To date, these sophisticated players have occupied the upper region of the typical market layer pyramid. Very recently, a few of the major players have given the nod to NTA by including them as options in some of their products. EMC, Spinnaker Networks, Network Appliance and Blue Arc have all found that they are able to offer the technology as part of their solutions sets while still maintaining their positions as 'high end.' This move adds credence to the notion that the time has arrived. These drives are now moving beyond the desktop to take their spot in the world of RAID. Although the notion at present is that these "options" are available as deep archive systems, or provide the ability to bring reference data from tape to online, it is clear that value has been found. In short, a re-definition of the market pyramid illustration where market segments are defined by performance and price points.