SCSI's past and future

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
06/28/05
Today's focus: SCSI's past and future

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* SCSI history
* Links related to Storage in the Enterprise
* Featured reader resource
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The Business Case for Adopting Blade Systems in the Data Center

HP ProLiant Blade Systems: The Business Case for Adopting Blade
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storage, networking and power. Learn how HP's blade system
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IT professionals are changing the way they back up and recover
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Today's focus: SCSI's past and future

By Mike Karp

When SCSI first appeared on computer systems in the mid-1980s,
it was precisely what its name indicated. SCSI - for those of
you with an interest in etymology but who lack a sense of
history - stood for "Small Computer Systems Interface," and was
designed to go into the early engineering workstations being
built by HP, SGI, Sun, and any number of other vendors now among
the dear departed. (Remember Apollo, Ardent, Dana, Data General,
for example? How about Stardent?)

SCSI was designed to serve the high performance data needs of
the CAD and engineering markets. In those days we had 8-bit and
16-bit connections that moved data at 5M-bytes and then at
10M-bytes per second, and SCSI began to creep out of the
engineering division and onto the IT floor, where it first
appeared in early RAID implementations hanging off superminis
from Prime Computer and others.

By the mid-1990s storage needs increased, disk drives had grown
and I/O requirements got much more demanding. What had
previously been "Fast SCSI" (10M-byte) was no longer seen as
being fast at all, and as SCSI-based RAID were being connected
to some very large machines, the meaning of the first "S" in
SCSI had long-since ceased to apply. SCSI was now on large
systems too.

Important things were happening. The ANSI T10 technical
committee ( <http://www.t10.org/> ) defined the evolving SCSI
standard, driving the performance specification from 10M- to
20M-bytes (Fast 20), then to 40M-bytes (originally Fast-40, then
renamed Ultra2 as by that time the old definition of "fast"
became obsolete at almost every T10 meeting).

Also in the mid-1990s chip makers like Adaptec and NCR
Microelectronics (now LSI) got together with disk vendors
(Quantum was the early technology leader in those days, followed
by Seagate) and makers of cabinets and connectors to provide
interoperable solutions and to help drive the evolving standard
through the committee. They also rolled out the first products
and helped found the SCSI Trade Association (
<http://www.scsita.org/> ), a vendors' organization that markets
the SCSI concept to the world. I remember that a lot of my work
at NCR (by that point rebadged as Symbios Logic) was in support
of all this.

Right now, although Fibre Channel seemingly gets most of the
press, the preponderance of enterprise data stored on spinning
disk is stored via SCSI.

By the first decade of this century, the specs were in for
Ultra160 and Ultra320. It was also plain to see that when I/O
reached 320M-bytes per second, SCSI had run out of headroom and
had no way to grow. Thus SCSI, previously a parallel interface,
was re-engineered for serial connectivity.

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) can support transfer rates in excess
of 1G byte/sec, far faster than either parallel SCSI or Fibre
Channel, and can provide space on the bus for far more drives as
well. And now, at last, products are starting to emerge from the
pipeline.

IBM announced SAS products earlier this year. Last week in San
Jose, SAS raised its head again as four companies got together
to roll out more products. Next time we'll take a look at
these, and discuss why you should care.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

The New Data Center: Spotlight on Storage
Network World, 06/27/05
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2005/ndc4/?rl
_______________________________________________________________
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:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Hewlett Packard
The Business Case for Adopting Blade Systems in the Data Center

HP ProLiant Blade Systems: The Business Case for Adopting Blade
Systems in the Data Center. When making a purchase decision,
blades should be considered as an integrated, consolidated
infrastructure-or a complete system-that includes servers,
storage, networking and power. Learn how HP's blade system
represents a new approach to infrastructure that can accelerate
the integration and transformation of your data center.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=107272
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Storage newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/index.html

Breaking storage news and analysis:
http://www.networkworld.com/topics/storage.html
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