NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE 09/02/04 Today's focus: How vendors benefit from Serial Attached SCSI
Dear [EMAIL PROTECTED], In this issue: * Serial Attached SCSI squeezes out costs for vendors * Links related to Storage in the Enterprise * Featured reader resource _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by Oracle An Economist Intelligence Unit White Paper: From Grid to Great? Grid computing is breaking out. Familiar mostly to academics, government groups, and scientific researchers, this technology that links together the power of diverse computers to create powerful, fast and flexible systems is beginning to catch on in the corporate world. Included in this white paper, results and interviews from a global survey among Sr Executives, click to download now http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=78719 _______________________________________________________________ IS SECURITY RIPE FOR OUTSOURCING? Security demands for online applications such as e-commerce and Web services are prompting more corporate customers to hand off security functions - such as intrusion detection and firewalls - to outside service providers. Find out if security should be outsourced in this Network World article: http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=78272 _______________________________________________________________ Today's focus: How vendors benefit from Serial Attached SCSI By Mike Karp Last time we began to look at why vendors are moving us off the parallel SCSI interface and onto Serial Attached SCSI, or SAS - identifying benefits such as thinner cables and increased signal integrity over longer distances. Today let's look at some of the other benefits vendors expect to see. Even those of us who avoided accounting classes like the plague understand that, generally speaking, corporate profitability results from making more money than you spend. Not unexpectedly, in order to ensure robust profit margins for their products, vendors always try to squeeze as much cost out of their offerings as they can. When it comes to hardware, cost reductions result from either the commoditization of parts (the more that are made, the cheaper the individual components become) or the introduction of new and more efficient technologies. Make either of these easy for vendors to build into their equipment and they are likely to go away happy. These are going to be good days indeed for vendors, because serial SCSI offers them a terrific opportunity to take advantage of both of these efficiency enablers, commoditized parts and innovative technology. This occurs because SAS and serial ATA devices use identical command sets (SATA uses a subset of the SCSI commands) and both types of devices can plug into the SAS connector. This means that when vendors design a backplane for SAS devices, they are at the same time designing an environment that will also work with SATA. Savings number one then, results from the fact that when they design a backplane or midplane, they get a "two-fer," a design that can be implemented in products that address high-performance (SAS) and low-priced (SATA) market segments. SAS-SATA compatibility results from some cooperation between the SAS and ATA communities, and from the SATA group's settling on the well-proven SCSI command set. What made this a relatively safe bet for both groups as they moved to the new serial implementations of their products is that serial connectivity is in every sense an evolutionary change rather than an abrupt shift in their product roadmaps. Thus, both groups get to execute on their new strategies while taking on relatively little risk. As more of these boxes are built to the SAS specification, the use of the cheaper SATA drives very likely will begin to drive the vendors' costs down, increasing their profitability. Whether this will translate into savings for IT buyers of course will be answered by whatever competitive pressures are driving the market at the time. We still should look at what values the IT buyer can expect from this and, in connection with that, we should look at what SAS will deliver when compared to Fibre Channel. More on that next time. RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS SCSI: Past, present and future Network World Storage in the Enterprise Newsletter, 02/03/04 http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/stor/2004/0202stor1.html Hitachi to unveil high-end storage array Network World, 08/30/04 http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/083004hitachi.html _______________________________________________________________ To contact: Mike Karp Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by Oracle An Economist Intelligence Unit White Paper: From Grid to Great? Grid computing is breaking out. Familiar mostly to academics, government groups, and scientific researchers, this technology that links together the power of diverse computers to create powerful, fast and flexible systems is beginning to catch on in the corporate world. Included in this white paper, results and interviews from a global survey among Sr Executives, click to download now http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=78718 _______________________________________________________________ ARCHIVE LINKS Archive of the Storage newsletter: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/stor/index.html Breaking storage news and analysis: http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/storage.html _______________________________________________________________ FEATURED READER RESOURCE CHECK OUT NW FUSION'S NEW WHITE PAPER LIBRARY NW Fusion's White Paper Library was recently re-launched with new features and improved capabilities! Sort NW Fusion's library of white papers by Date and Vendor, view white papers by TECHNCIAL CATEGORY, mouse over white paper descriptions and take advantage of our IMPROVED white paper search engine. CLICK HERE: <http://www.nwfusion.com/vendorview/whitepapers.html> _______________________________________________________________ May We Send You a Free Print Subscription? You've got the technology snapshot of your choice delivered at your fingertips each day. Now, extend your knowledge by receiving 51 FREE issues to our print publication. 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