Storage Undergoes Major Milestones

Adding to this trend is the rapid commoditization of hard disk drives (HDDs), which are so cheap now that vendors no longer talk about the per-megabyte cost in cents. Instead, they measure the costs by referencing the per-gigabyte cost in dollars. But that's not to say disk-drive technology development has halted. In fact, the industry is witnessing some major milestones simultaneously: One is the move to the 2.5-inch-HDD form factor (meaning the external dimensions of the drives), and the other is the introduction of multiple new interfaces.

For Mike Chenery, vice president of advanced product engineering at Fujitsu, it's the first time in his 33 years in storage he has seen these kinds of multiple transitions. "It's good because it allows us to go smaller both in form factor and the interface," he says. "This, however, also adds risks to all our plans." No doubt, these transitions are going to demand greater coordination among component and systems vendors because the risks include everything from vendors' conducting numerous interoperability tests to how vendors market the new interfaces so clients use them for the right applications.

As for the form-factor change, the enterprise HDD industry is moving from the current 3.5-inch enclosure to 2.5 inches. For example, San Jose, Calif.-based Fujitsu recently announced it has sent its 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives to Hewlett-Packard for testing in next-generation servers and subsystems. Fujitsu expects to start shipping 2.5-inch drives to OEMs for high-end systems by the end of this year, and full systems should be available to customers in 2005. Also, Seagate currently has its 2.5-inch Savvio Enterprise drive in the hands of OEMs and will make it available in the channel in the second quarter.

Then there are the interface changes. The long-standing Parallel SCSI bus interface, which currently owns roughly 85 percent of the HDD enterprise market, is maxed out at 320 MBps.

"We have to jump to a new technology to continue the performance," says Jeff Jenkins, director of marketing for industry-standard servers at HP.

Enter SAS, which is expected to double the speed of the current Ultra320 SCSI interface by sometime in 2007. Jenkins expects SAS to be deployed in industry-standard servers, entry-level SANs and external storage such as JBODs. Fujitsu projects that Ultra320 SCSI drives will own less than 10 percent of the market by 2008, while SAS drives will attain about 60 percent.

Moreover, the SATA interface, typically used in notebooks, now is being marketed for nearline storage because of its low cost. SATA has been developed with Native Command Queuing to boost its performance, but customers are still wary of a perceived low reliability associated with the ATA interface. But, according to analyst Jim Porter, customers can thank SATA for helping to drive down the cost of SCSI and Fibre Channel drives.

Speaking of which, we should not forget about Fibre Channel, which thus far remains the choice in high-end, mission-critical SANs. New interfaces certainly mean more choices for customers, but that also entails more education. SATA should be deployed with low workload applications.

"The positioning is very important," Jenkins says. "We don't want people to think that SATA is just as good as SAS. Then they will deploy it in the wrong environment, and it will fail. That is our biggest fear."