According to a recent report from the Gartner Dataquest market research firm, drive manufacturers shipped 4.15 million Serial Attached SCSI SAS) drives in 2006, representing 11.2% of all multi-user drive shipments and bringing total SAS shipments to approximately 4.5 million units. Gartner expects SAS drive shipments to approach 12 million units this year, surpassing shipments of Ultra320 parallel SCSI drives.
The most recent product entry in the SAS market is Infortrend’s EonStor (ES) S12S-G1030, which was introduced today and is the company’s first “pure” SAS array—e.g., it has both front-end (host) and back-end (disk) SAS connections.
The 2U, 12-bay, single-controller RAID subsystem supports SAS and/or Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives and comes with four “wide” SAS host ports with 12Gbps bandwidth per port, and more than 760MBps aggregate throughput, according to Infortrend officials. The ES S12S also has a built-in SAS expansion port that can connect to as many as four ES S12S-J1000-G SAS JBOD arrays for a maximum of 45TB of capacity when configured with 60 750GB SATA drives.
In addition to supporting all RAID configurations, or levels, Infortrend’s SAS-SAS subsystem supports RAID 6 (dual parity) for protection against two simultaneous drive failures.
Also today, Infortrend introduced SANWatch snapshot software, which enables point-in-time copies of data, for its EonStor ASIC400 subsystems. Features include copy-on-write technology, hardware-based snapshots (which offloads the host CPU), and automated snapshot pruning to recycle storage space either by selected capacity or time thresholds.
For more information on SAS, visit:
The SCSI Trade Association (STA) at www.scsita.org
The SAS Resource Center at infostor.com/sas/sas_home.cfm
The Serial Storage Wire at www.serialstoragewire.com
