Government Computer News
The little cable that could
Get out the red pens and mark up your enterprise storage RFPs. Serial technology will change the way you buy.
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Who would have guessed that simply replacing a cable inside a computer system could cause profound changes in data management? Yet the industry’s shift toward serial cables for connecting disk drives is destined to shake up the way agencies think of storage, prompting new types of networked solutions and redefining the roles of traditional storage arrays.
The bad news is IT administrators may have to scrap preconceived notions of how and where to store their growing mountains of digital information. The good news is the new serial technologies could help save agencies money, improve performance and streamline their storage infrastructures.
“There is a paradigm shift going on now. We’re going from parallel technologies to a serial environment,” said David Deming, president of technology training company Solution Technology of Ben Lomond, Calif. He spoke last month at the Storage World Conference in Long Beach, Calif. “What you will see is serial [advanced technology attachment devices] becoming the main interface in probably every computer environment you encounter today.”
Considering the breadth of computer environments in government use, that presents a significant shift agencies will want to exploit for their own gains.
Serial-attached storage “fixes a lot of roadblocks,” in today’s storage systems, Deming said.
Building a better interface
Crack open a computer purchased a few years ago and you will find wide, bulky cables connecting the hard drive and optical disk. They use an interface called the advanced technology attachment. ATA is a parallel technology be- cause the cables have 16 side-by-side wires through which data is sent.
ATA has some well-known limitations. Using an ATA cable, you can attach a maximum of two devices to a motherboard, and ATA disks top out at a throughput of 133 megabytes/sec.
For workstations and servers that require more peripheral support and performance than ATA offers, system builders have long turned to another parallel adapter—the small computer system interface. SCSI can attach up to 15 devices to a single cable and reach a throughput of 320 megabytes/sec. It has long been considered a high-end direct-attached storage mechanism for mission-critical data. But SCSI can be a bother to set up, from assigning each drive a unique number to adding a terminator cap at the end of each SCSI ribbon.
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