Re: FCIA applauds HP's "thought leadership" on FATA drives

From: Keith Parris (keithparris_NOSPAM_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/31/04 

Date: 30 Jul 2004 17:19:52 -0700

"Jack Pea***" <pea***@simconv.com> wrote in message news:<odqdnZ_lR89HOZTcRVn-qA@mpowercom.net>...
> FC arrays are all very well but they don't mean much for small/medium business
> sites.

HP has not been ignoring the SMB space. HP announced future Serial ATA
(SATA) support in the MSA series of controllers as part of an SMB
product push in March: see
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/040322a.html and
http://www.internetnews.com/storage/article.php/3329261

So for those situations where SATA is a better fit, HP will have SATA:
"HP is very much committed to SATA technology. [In March], we
announced future SATA support for our Modular Smart Array (MSA) family
-- a line of products targeted at the SMB market. This announcement
was part of HP's broader Smart Office Initiative. Regards, Alan Dunto,
HP Storage Public Relations." (from
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci958155,00.html
)

The EVA3000, even with its Fibre Channel drives, has also been quite
popular in the SMB space, from what I hear. (In Richie Lary's talk in
Munich, he said the #1 pain point for folks today is managing disk
space, and the EVA's virtualization makes that task very easy.) And
the MSA1000 (a Fibre Channel array controller on the host side, with
SCSI on the device side) fits in nicely below that. What folks used to
do with OpenVMS clusters and multi-host parallel SCSI busses they can
do with MSA1000s and EVA3000s today.

> Now if HP had been pioneering removeable cheap commodity IDE drives
> for backup that would show some leadership.

The role of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (ATA) is still a
matter of debate within the industry -- see
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci970787,00.html
for example. "While vendors are launching new drives and refitting
high-end storage arrays to accommodate the low-cost Serial Advanced
Technology Attachment (SATA) technology, many in the industry doubt
that SATA will suffice in an enterprise data center." ... "Seagate is
hedging its bets in the data center with the launch of a 400 GB SATA
drive and a Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA) drive that packs
up to one-half terabyte of capacity." ... "The FATA drive is based on
the same platform as ATA and Serial ATA drives, but features a
dual-ported 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel interface. Scott said the difference
in price between SATA and FATA drives is "tens of percents.""

FATA is all about giving customers choice, and potentially saving a
lot of money. FATA drives couple the low-cost mechanics (due to high
volumes) of ATA drives with the reliability/availability of Fibre
Channel. That's a good potential combination for many in the OpenVMS
marketplace.

>From http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci958155,00.html
"At 250 GB per drive, the FATA drive is based on the same basic
platform as ATA and Serial ATA drives, but features a dual-ported
2Gb/s Fibre Channel interface. "Our customers told us they were
willing to sacrifice performance, but they weren't willing to
sacrifice availability," says Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for
HP's online storage division. The EVA is already built around Fibre
Channel disk enclosures, so from HP's perspective, this is a much
cleaner solution than modifying the EVA enclosure to support ATA.
"There's lots of cost and complexity involved in going between Fibre
Channel and SATA," says Fitze. "If you remove the cost and complexity
of the electronics, you can reduce the overall cost to customers."
Fitze predicts that HP will be able to offer FATA-based EVAs to
customers for less than a comparable ATA/SATA-based system. Customers
will be able to mix and match FATA drives with high-performance drives
freely, without having to purchase a separate enclosure. The drives
themselves, Fitze says, will cost about half of what an enterprise
Fibre Channel drives goes for on a cost/MB basis."
...
"Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group,
says that price-wise, HP is probably erring on the side of caution.
"I've had assurances that pricing will be very much in line with SATA
drives," she says. Furthermore, because they are dual-ported, these
FATA drives are inherently more reliable, and have better performance
too."