SAS is alive and kicking in Hannover

FOR THOSE WHO think SCSI is dead, think again, there was enough SAS at CeBIT to make the most jaded drive enthusiast smile. SAS is alive and well, just ask Promise, Adaptec an Atto.

What you are seeing here is the back of the Promise Vtrack E610sD raid box the front is totally packed with hot plug drives. There are two versions, the E for Enterprise and the M for everyone else. The E comes in SCSI and SAS, has dual redundant everything, and can cascade to 80 drives over five bays.

Promise Vtrak E610sD

You can get them in 8, 12 and 16 drive variants on the M versions, 12 and 16 for the E. The M lacks a lot of the redundancy features and can't cascade to other boxes, but is otherwise the same. There is also an option for a front mounted LCD that will allow you to set nearly everything, and an iSCSI version is coming in the near future.

Promise EX8650 controller

Here we have the Promise Supertrack EX8650 controller, an 8 channel internal SAS card. It has a battery backup and there are 4 internal/4 external as well as 8 external channel versions coming.

One word of caution though, I usually would put in a paragraph here about how I have used Promise controllers before and had good experiences, but that is patently not the case this time. Promise promised me that their Linux drivers are up to snuff now, but I would take that with a big grain of salt. Promises are promises, so before you buy anything from these guys, make sure they have drivers out for your OS, otherwise you may end up with an expensive doorstop. Trust but verify.

Adaptec 52445 RAID controller

Moving to more Linux friendly ground, we have Adaptec with a range of controllers. The Adaptec decoder ring says their cards are named 5(internal ports)(external ports)5, so this 52445 has 24 internal channels and four external. They had cards all the way down to a lowly 8 channel 5085, and driver support for the last few generations of product have been excellent.

Atto ESAS-H308 and -H380 HBAs

Atto is another company that has been doing controllers a long time, and experience does matter. They have a similar naming convention to adaptec, H3(external lanes)(internal lanes), or maybe it is the other way around, check before you buy a few hundred. Either way, they make a lot of HBAs.

Atto Faststream 7000

One interesting product that you probably never heard of is the Faststream 7000 board. It is an ATX form factor board with a DIMM slot, a PCIe slot, ethernet, and enough SAS ports to choke a horse. The idea is to roll your own storage device, you add what you want, and there is a standard slot to add more functionality. If you don't want to make a device, Atto will sell you one, basically the 7000 in a box with storage and control software. This one has a lot of possibilities. µ