The unprecedented increasing demand to store data is irrefutable. The need to store data spans across different applications and environments as well—each with their own unique requirements. The demand for capacity-optimized drives, where capacity and cost rule over performance, is one drive type that has contributed much of the growth in drive sales overall and benefits environments such as secondary storage, digital content and media, disk-to-disk backup, data retention, and virtualization.
While SATA (Serial ATA) drives have been sufficient to date, another serial-based drive technology is making inroads that can satisfy the same data requirements but with improved performance, data integrity and reliability. This drive technology is Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Already well established in high-performance drive markets, SAS is now penetrating secondary storage tiers with capacity-optimized drives.
The Enterprise Storage Forum’s article highlights the reasons why capacity-optimized drives are in demand and why nearline SAS drives are now entering the market as a viable option for this drive category. The benefits of nearline SAS drives are covered and solid proof points are offered to provide further evidence that this technology should be considered for future capacity-optimized drive purchases.
Gina Geisel is the product marketing manager for the SAS-based storage arrays of LSI’s Engenio Storage Group. John Szantho has been in product management within LSI’s Engenio Storage Group for more than six years and has more than ten years of storage industry experience. Barbara J. Craig is a senior product marketing manager on Seagate’s Enterprise Storage team