Hewlett-Packard plans to ship by mid-2004 a disc array
that can mix serial attached SCSI drives and lower-cost serial
Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) devices.
HP said the upcoming array will have a single serial backplane
that can support both kinds of drives, plus an interface that will
let the different discs replicate data to one another for backup
and recovery purposes. The mix-and-match capabilities could
potentially lower storage costs by allowing IT administrators to
provision capacity based on the type of data that is being
stored.
Daniel Morreale, chief information officer at North Bronx
Healthcare Network, recently talked to HP about the array for
potential use in storing medical images and documents from clinical
studies.
"I can definitely see the value of it," he said. "We'd like to
get rid of our tape environment."
HP's disc array would let North Bronx Healthcare store images
and electronic documents on serial ATA discs that cost roughly the
same as tape devices and provide end-users with online access to
the data, Morreale said.
But he added that the healthcare provider is currently
installing an EMC Centera array, which uses parallel ATA disc
drives to store data in a non-rewritable format.
Mark Almendinger, enterprise infrastructure manager at
Huntington Bancshares, said the financial services firm could use
the promised HP array to take advantage of inexpensive serial ATA
drives for applications like its Notes e-mail systems. Data from
heavy-duty transaction applications could be stored on
higher-performance serial attached SCSI devices, added
Almendinger.
HP is partnering on the mixed array with disc drive maker
Seagate Technology and network adapter supplier Adaptec. Seagate
and Maxtor have both said they plan to begin shipping serial
attached SCSI drives to hardware supplier by the end of the
year.
A 1.0 version of the serial attached SCSI specification was
ratified by a technical committee last month and is in the midst of
a 45-day public comment period. One of the key features built into
the new storage interconnect technology is its compatibility with
serial ATA drives.
HP is the first supplier to formally announced plans to develop
an array that mixes the two technologies. But Robert Grey, an
analyst at IDC, said the product promised by HP is only the first
of what will be "a total industry flip over time" to such
devices.
Lucas Mearian writes for Computerworld