Storage Tip: SAS makes its way into your storage future

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

What seems to be the problem? At the high end of disk storage requirements, the use of Fibre Channel (FC) disk drives has been commonplace in a storage area network (SAN). However, the use of FC may not be cost effective for some requirements, especially for smaller configurations. At the low end of the disk storage requirements spectrum, the use of small computer system interface (SCSI) drives has had a long and proud history for direct-attached storage (DAS), but SCSI has not been able to keep up with the flexibility and manageability that is needed even for smaller storage configurations. Thus, a need exists for a storage approach that meets the need for both mid-size SANs and for DAS configurations. Serial SCSI (SAS) offers a storage approach to meet those needs.