With all the press about SAS and it’s benefits: Simpler Cabling, Gigabit throughput, dual-ported high reliability SAS drives, it seems as though it should be ready to take it’s place in the Enterprise. But just where in Enterprise?

In the first release of SAS and it’s components, it looks as though SAS will be relegated to only point-to point topologies, with a maximum device count of 128 -same as FC-AL.

For SAS to assume an “Enterprise-class” role, I would think it would also need the usual high availability attributes like: Multipathing support, Clustering support, and what about Fanout Expanders to get beyond the 128 device count. I hear several chip vendors have the component, but none have announced they intend to make an external, rack-mount, fanout expander.

So let me hear your opinions about how important these other features are to allow SAS to play in these HA segments.

SR

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 and is filed under General, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Steve Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.