Saving Money with SAS and SATA RAID

Early in the days of my career as an IT administrator and later as an IT engineer, careful consideration was always taken when considering the power consumption requirements of servers, storage arrays, uninterruptable power supplies, etc – anything and everything that went into a lab – and yes, even the stereo that helped the late nights and longer weekends seem not so bad.

Careful consideration was taken, at least in my case, to make sure that I had the correct electrical outlets available and so to avoid the cursing building maintenance supervisor when I blew a fuse.

Over the past few years, the motivation for such careful consideration has shifted quite a bit. Not only is there concern for the correct electrical outlets and minimizing the risk of unruly encounters with the building supervisor, the cliché requirement to “do more with less” has now stretched to the data center energy bill.

Available today, there is a great deal of technologies and best practices that can help us “propeller heads” address these new power utilization limitations. Such technologies include server consolidation, server virtualization and idle disk-drive spin-down.

A very common practice in terms of tiered storage, but lesser known best practice to reduce power consumption, is to balance disk-based power efficiency with capacity and performance.

Without doubt, SAS drives are quickly consuming the market for high performance disk drives over traditional fibre channel disk drives and legacy SCSI disk drives.

For low cost, high capacity disk, SATA drives have already become the staple in almost every IT environment ranging from the Fortune 100 data center in NYC to the 10-person plumbing business in rural Iowa.

SATA cannot obtain the same random I/O performance requirements that SAS drives can address. However, when taking into consideration the wattage per terabyte of capacity, there is no question that SATA reigns supreme.

The table below shows the facts from www.seagate.com regarding their SAS and SATA drive power utilization per drive:

Although the difference may seem small when comparing one drive to another, picture the wattage required for 100 terabytes of each:

· 100 TB SATA requires 1.5W

· 100 TB SAS requires 10W

Taking this a step further, “best of breed” storage arrays are now being architected to support both SAS and SATA drives intermixed within a single enclosure! This awards storage administrators the ability to provide both SAS and SATA to address performance and capacity requirements without having to purchase additional arrays, which ultimately have additional power requirements of their own.

Overland Storage has already taken this advantage into account and launched ULTAMUS RAID 1200 in February of 2007.

Now in its second generation, ULTAMUS RAID 1200 provides users with the ability to intermix both high performance SAS with high capacity SATA to address a broad range of application requirements within a single chassis and while also addressing the ongoing need to be conscious of the energy bill.

If only I had this capability available to me years ago… I could have avoided the explicit language of Don, the maintenance man, and could have (quite possibly) justified squeezing a more quality stereo system into my capital budget.

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Kevin C. Wise | Senior Product Manager

Print | posted on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 4:03 PM