From my admittedly jaded point of view it feels like the storage industry has done plenty to promote SAS as the replacement for SCSI. I’ve certainly posted on the topic enough, and I’ve given several presentations and webinars touting the virtues of SAS. My guess is that all the enterprise folks that use SCSI or FC now certainly know about SAS.

But it feels like the channel doesn’t get it yet.

Why is that? Adaptec and LSI have been shipping SAS controllers in the channel for several quarters. And SAS enclosures and cables are available.

I think it all comes down to the drives. And there are two reasons. [Spoiler warning: These are the WRONG reasons.]

First, you can hardly buy SAS drives in the channel. Most of the SAS drives are still going to high-end OEMs, such as IBM who has been shipping them since Q1’05. The drive vendors claim to be increasing their capacity “soon”.

Second, today’s SAS drives are just too high-end for the channel. You certainly can’t find any 7200 RPM drives, and very few 10K drives. And the 15K drives are just ridiculously expensive.

Let’s go to the trusty Pricewatch website to check this information.

Pricewatch lists seventeen SATA drives ranging from 37GB to 750GB, with spot prices of $35 to $412, respectively. But they list only three SAS drives at 37GB, 73GB and 147GB, ranging from $324 to $425. Trying to make the comparison as fair as possible, a 160GB SATA drive is $55, a HECK OF A LOT less than $425 for a similarly-sized SAS drive. Wow.

But those are the wrong reasons for SAS not taking off in the channel. As I’ve repeatedly said, the best thing about SAS is that it supports SATA. You need to buy SAS initiators so that you can hook up more SATA drives. Who the heck cares about SAS drives.

The May 2006 issue of Business Solutions Magazine has more to say on the topic.

If you’re a storage VAR with experience selling SCSI technology, you may be wondering when to make the move to SAS. That time is now.

The article goes on to explain why SAS is taking off, how it compares to FC, etc.

More importantly, they have a quote from one of the world’s smartest people, Tim Connolly, a guy who just coincidently now owes me $20.

Tim Connolly is the VP of data protection solutions marketing for Adaptec, a manufacturer of SAS HBAs. “Some VARs are ahead of others in the adoption of SAS,” says Connolly. “VARs that are lagging behind should be paying more attention to what OEMs are doing in this market. Those VARs should be bringing SAS technology in-house and evaluating it now. If they let SAS get ahead of them, they will have a hard time catching up.”

I’m feeling it, man. Keep going…

Connolly touched on one of the big plusses for selling SAS. The ability to connect SAS and SATA drives to a single SAS HBA is a real growth opportunity for VARs. Even the smallest VAR can sell a tiered storage solution, with SAS serving as the primary storage tier and SATA serving as the secondary tier. VARs are able to add drives as needed because of the flexible serial architecture of SAS. If a customer does not need the speed and availability of SAS drives now, the VAR can sell a SAS controller with less-expensive SATA drives. When it’s time to upgrade to SAS, the customer can add SAS drives — no forklift upgrade is required. The VAR only needs to stock one set of products to meet both demands — the direct result of aligning SAS and SATA technologies. Cost savings will not be a compelling argument to move SCSI customers to SAS for some time to come. VARs should suggest SAS if a customer is looking to add new storage, primary or secondary, because SAS will provide the customer with the most storage flexibility. Customers with SCSI equipment can begin the transition to SAS independent of the SCSI network, while not disrupting the existing SCSI infrastructure.

And then Business Solutions brings it home with…

VARs and customers often resist the prospect of a technology overhaul. However, the SCSI-to-SAS transition looks like it will be smoother than most. SAS technology gives VARs the opportunity to knock on customers’ doors with some good news: faster technology, more flexibility, compatibility with SATA, and virtually no training required — at the same cost or less than parallel SCSI.

So there you go. VARs aren’t opposing the move to new technologies, and they certainly seem to be embracing SATA, but they just need to be careful what initiator they use to hook up those drives. SATA initiators are a dead-end path. VARs need to be looking at SAS now. Don’t worry about the drives. They’ll come along eventually.

TT

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 and is filed under Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway. 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.