SAS Provides New Sales Opportunities

If you’re a storage VAR with experience selling SCSI technology, you may be wondering when to make the move to SAS. That time is now. SAS presents a wide array of new sales opportunities for VARs. Companies from SOHO (small office and home office) to large enterprises are fertile ground for this new technology because SAS is flexible enough to fit into most IT environments. SAS is the next generation of SCSI technology. While SAS retains the traditional SCSI command set offering a serial-based architecture, the serial nature of SAS improves storage performance, increases scalability, and extends connection distances when compared to traditional SCSI. SAS is a rework of the 20-year legacy of parallel-based SCSI. It was developed because SCSI hit a wall in performance at Ultra320 (320 Mb/s transfer rate), due to the limitations of the parallel interface. The SAS standard was approved by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) in 2003, so all of the SAS vendors are now working from the same blueprint.

As with parallel SCSI, certain compatibility rules apply to SAS. A SCSI disk drive will not work with a SAS controller. However, SAS is unique in that a serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drive can connect to a SAS controller. SCSI was never compatible with SATA or ATA drives.

Use Your SCSI Experience To Sell SAS
Because SAS uses the SCSI command set, there is little (or no) training required for VARs to transition to SAS. A basic understanding of SCSI technology will be enough to have VARs installing SAS systems immediately. System builders can use the same enclosures for SAS as they did for SCSI, simply by changing the SCSI interface card (or backplane) to SAS.

“SAS is a leap forward for direct-attached storage,” explains Franco Castaldini, senior product marketing manager for Seagate, a company that produces SAS disk drives. “SAS will be positioned as a replacement for parallel SCSI. System builders and VARs should market SAS to customers of any size using SCSI or customers of any size that are looking to expand their storage infrastructure for better performance.” The common denominator in all of these sales opportunities is the flexibility of SAS.

Position Your Company As A SAS Expert Now
Charlie Kraus is the director of the Host Bus Adapter (HBA) Division for LSI Logic, which manufactures HBAs, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and other types of integrated circuits. “We are taking the message to our channel partners, telling them they shouldn’t wait for SAS to take off — it’s already happening now,” he explains. LSI is not the only vendor taking a proactive stance. All of the vendors I spoke with are aggressively promoting education about SAS — especially on their Web sites.

Infortrend is a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) manufacturer that began offering a SAS RAID array in September 2005. “OEMs have pushed SAS technology in response to customer demands for tier-one storage performance at a lower price than FC [Fibre Channel],” explained Dan Carlson, senior director of U.S. sales for Infortrend. “It all comes down to cost. Direct-attached FC-to-FC solutions are expensive. SAS will provide a less-expensive alternative to FC, while still providing the high availability of FC.” Seagate’s Castaldini has a slightly different opinion: “The decision to go with SAS will be based on the improved performance and the new features of the SAS technology. Cost will be secondary. Acquisition cost is not the main reason to purchase SAS, as it is with SATA. It’s difficult to compare SAS, SATA, and FC based on cost per gigabyte — it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.”

Tim Connolly is the VP of data protection solutions marketing for Adaptec, a manufacturer of SAS HBAs. “Some VARs are ahead of others in the adoption of SAS,” says Connolly. “VARs that are lagging behind should be paying more attention to what OEMs are doing in this market. Those VARs should be bringing SAS technology in-house and evaluating it now. If they let SAS get ahead of them, they will have a hard time catching up.”

Use SAS/SATA Compatibility To Create Scalable Storage Systems
Connolly touched on one of the big plusses for selling SAS. The ability to connect SAS and SATA drives to a single SAS HBA is a real growth opportunity for VARs. Even the smallest VAR can sell a tiered storage solution, with SAS serving as the primary storage tier and SATA serving as the secondary tier. VARs are able to add drives as needed because of the flexible serial architecture of SAS. If a customer does not need the speed and availability of SAS drives now, the VAR can sell a SAS controller with less-expensive SATA drives. When it’s time to upgrade to SAS, the customer can add SAS drives — no forklift upgrade is required. The VAR only needs to stock one set of products to meet both demands — the direct result of aligning SAS and SATA technologies. Cost savings will not be a compelling argument to move SCSI customers to SAS for some time to come. VARs should suggest SAS if a customer is looking to add new storage, primary or secondary, because SAS will provide the customer with the most storage flexibility. Customers with SCSI equipment can begin the transition to SAS independent of the SCSI network, while not disrupting the existing SCSI infrastructure.

VARs and customers often resist the prospect of a technology overhaul. However, the SCSI-to-SAS transition looks like it will be smoother than most. SAS technology gives VARs the opportunity to knock on customers’ doors with some good news: faster technology, more flexibility, compatibility with SATA, and virtually no training required — at the same cost or less than parallel SCSI.