How to make SATA work for network-attached storage

By Scott K. Cleland

June 16, 2003 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The network-attached storage (NAS) market is one of the fastest-growing consumers of storage technologies. It has become part of our common storage language. Few products in recent years have gained acceptance as quickly as NAS. The technology has been growing by double digits every year and is expected to continue its growth. The ease of use and low cost of NAS have made it a popular choice for companies needing additional storage capacity.

Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), meanwhile, is rapidly becoming the interface of choice for the majority of the market, and Serial ATA (SATA) is likely to be the dominant disk drive interface for the foreseeable future. With the emergence of SATA RAID solutions and SATA disk drive capacities reaching 250GB in 2003, the marriage of these two technologies is sure to set the NAS stage on fire.

According to Gartner, market growth in 2003 for NAS storage appliances is projected to be 16% of the compound annual growth rate. The anticipated growth in 2003 for the NAS market represents a strong recovery from a slight downturn in 2002. Enterprise spending in this space is projected to reach $3 billion by 2007.

As SATA disk drives become available in volume to NAS suppliers, the shift from SCSI/Fibre Channel to SATA will accelerate. The continuing hunger for larger amounts of accessible data and the economics that bind the total cost of ownership (TCO) to products that meet today's higher cost-conscious standards will make SATA the alternative of choice for multiterabyte NAS appliances.

NAS is designed with plug and play, also known as turnkey functionality. The target environment for NAS products include workgroups, small to midsize businesses or any IT shop that may require a single server that can meet the growing requirements for capacity and ease of use. NAS is also used for file-server consolidation and management.

Server appliance technology provides for ease of installation, minimal maintenance and remote systems management.

NAS is solving several problems at different fronts in the enterprise:

File-server appliances used for consolidation and ease of management.

Backup appliances that serve as tape replacements.

Staging appliance for backup solutions or "out-of-band" backups.

Near-line storage appliances for ready access to noncritical data.

Today's economic climate requires designs that combine the SATA drive cost advantages and SATA RAID reliability and data accessibility characteristics. SATA RAID elements provide additional functional benefits to the NAS builder. These benefits include scalable performance, typically achieved through the implementation of switched architecture at the RAID controller level. RAID controllers usage of point-to-point serial architecture will eliminate drive interface bottlenecks by integrating high-speed, low-latency

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