3Ware's serial ATA RAID controller, to be announced today, uses a
combination of cheap disk technology and high-performance
redundancy to give it many of the attributes of more expensive
SCSI-attached drives.
The vendor is unveiling its Escalade 8500-4, 8500-8 and 8500-12
series RAID controllers, RAID management software and embedded RAID
operating system, along with the fourth generation of its
StorSwitch switched RAID architecture.
The Escalade 8500 series supports between four and 12 Ultra ATA/133
drives with a single PCI card, for up to 2TB of disk storage at
about half the cost of SCSI-attached disk. The controller supports
RAID levels 0, 1, 10 and 5 and unconfigured hard disks. The
controller allows for hot-swappable and spare drives and runs on
Microsoft Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP and Linux.
Bob Zimmerman, an analyst at Giga Information Group, said ATA
serial drive technology for the enterprise data centre appears to
be most promising for near-line storage.
Serial ATA's road map began last August with its introduction as a
finalised specification with initial data transfer speeds of
1.5Gbit/sec. The technology's road map has that speed increasing to
3Gbit/sec. and eventually 6Gbit/sec. during the next 10 years.
"We're very much of the philosophy that ATA drives today are far
more reliable than SCSI drives were 10 years ago. It's just a case
of perception rather than reality that they're not reliable," said
Barbara Murphy, product marketing manager at 3Ware.
Under direct-attached storage conditions, an ATA drive cannot put
out the same performance as SCSI or Fibre Channel-attached drives.
The spindle head of the drives runs at about 15,000 rpm in the
latter, vs. 7,000 rpm in an ATA drive.
By using a switched, serial architecture, 3Ware allows more than
one drive at a time to send data across the internal bus, which
greatly enhances the throughput and ability to configure the disk.
3Ware will also announce the latest incarnation of its RAID
management software, Version 7.5, which offers a browser-based
array management utility for local and remote management and
monitoring of arrays and their disks.