SAS is scalable
What truly sets SAS apart from its I/O counterparts is its scalability benefits. In fact, SAS infrastructure offers scalability to the market that was once unthinkable, offering potential development of hundreds of disk drives in a single domain. IT managers have increasingly looked to SATA for nearline storage applications, and SAS have a boon to SATA disk drives in the enterprise market. It is true that SATA II has introduces SATA port multipliers into the mix and that these devices certainly improve the expandability of SATA. Is that enhanced expandability sufficient for the ever-increasing demand of the enterprise market? Although port multipliers are available for 4-, 8-, and even 16-drive connectivity, they cannot be linked together, thereby limiting their expendability for larger drive topologies.
Performance scalability is equally as important to the enterprise market as drive scalability and once again SAS answers the call. As mentioned earlier, since SAS is a point-to-point topology, performance is much more scalable as opposed to a shared bus interface such as Ultra320 SCSI. With 3Gb/s of dedicated bandwidth for each target device, I/O performance scale with each additional drive added to the topology.
Conclusion
As the thirst for more storage capacity continues to grow, greater requirement are placed on the I/O interfaces to satiate that thirst. SAS was specially engineered for that purpose. Its deployment flexibility in supporting differing classes of disk drives for both online and nearline storage makes SAS infrastructure even more compelling for the evolution of information Lifecycle Management and the implementation of tiered storage architectures. The scalability of both performance and capacity strengthens SAS technology as the I/O interface of choice to meet the constantly increasing demands of present and future interface storage application.
Concluded
