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Hello,
The storage industry seems to be moving at lightning speed compared to the rest of the industry, and for the storage geeks out there, that's exciting and scary at the same time, as we struggle to update our understanding of long standing technologies (SATA/SAS and RAID) as the paradigms switch out from under them.
What I'm wondering is: What will the future of RAID and HBAs look like for the enthusiast / pro / enterprise markets will be (as opposed to purely consumer technologies), now that SATA and SAS are basically obsolete?
Yes, I know some will argue that SAS and SATA will be around for a while, but it's hard to argue that they're not technologically obsolete, even if they will be carried forward due to sheer marketplace inertia, confusion and lack of education about the current state of storage.
I'm sure there will be some reactions along the lines of 'why do I need RAID', or 'M.2 cards are fast enough by themselves', but RAID and even just drives with proper cabling have been around for a long while now and provide a variety of functionality: speed, aggregation, redundancy, placement flexibility and expandability. Those needs haven't gone away.
So now that U.2 looks like a new cabling standard to replace SAS and SATA cabling, it should be possible to build PCIe 3.0 16x cards that support several next gen drives, but I haven't seen any announcements. The HBA industry seems to have shrunk to mainly LSI (Avago), with Adaptec (PMC Sierra), with the latter barely being mentioned any more. It seems scary to have the industry so reliant on a single supplier for such a key technology.
The other big change that's affecting storage seems to be software-defined storage. While 'soft raid' has been around for a while, Linux, Windows and VMWare all seem to have spread the acceptability and in some cases even superiority of their software based solutions over hardware RAID. But even without the 'RAID' part, we still need HBAs and backplanes/storage enclosures to build out storage using these new technologies beyond having a couple of drives in a 'PC'.
For someone looking to build out storage, whether you are a creative professional that needs high bandwidth for video capture/ processing or an IT manager/CIO looking for storage for virtualization / databases or other high transaction workloads, I think there's a lack of clarity as to what's coming in the next year or two.
The storage industry seems to be moving at lightning speed compared to the rest of the industry, and for the storage geeks out there, that's exciting and scary at the same time, as we struggle to update our understanding of long standing technologies (SATA/SAS and RAID) as the paradigms switch out from under them.
What I'm wondering is: What will the future of RAID and HBAs look like for the enthusiast / pro / enterprise markets will be (as opposed to purely consumer technologies), now that SATA and SAS are basically obsolete?
Yes, I know some will argue that SAS and SATA will be around for a while, but it's hard to argue that they're not technologically obsolete, even if they will be carried forward due to sheer marketplace inertia, confusion and lack of education about the current state of storage.
I'm sure there will be some reactions along the lines of 'why do I need RAID', or 'M.2 cards are fast enough by themselves', but RAID and even just drives with proper cabling have been around for a long while now and provide a variety of functionality: speed, aggregation, redundancy, placement flexibility and expandability. Those needs haven't gone away.
So now that U.2 looks like a new cabling standard to replace SAS and SATA cabling, it should be possible to build PCIe 3.0 16x cards that support several next gen drives, but I haven't seen any announcements. The HBA industry seems to have shrunk to mainly LSI (Avago), with Adaptec (PMC Sierra), with the latter barely being mentioned any more. It seems scary to have the industry so reliant on a single supplier for such a key technology.
The other big change that's affecting storage seems to be software-defined storage. While 'soft raid' has been around for a while, Linux, Windows and VMWare all seem to have spread the acceptability and in some cases even superiority of their software based solutions over hardware RAID. But even without the 'RAID' part, we still need HBAs and backplanes/storage enclosures to build out storage using these new technologies beyond having a couple of drives in a 'PC'.
For someone looking to build out storage, whether you are a creative professional that needs high bandwidth for video capture/ processing or an IT manager/CIO looking for storage for virtualization / databases or other high transaction workloads, I think there's a lack of clarity as to what's coming in the next year or two.