Breaking The 1M RAID5 Write IOPS Barrier

In today’s data-centric age, enormous amounts of data are generated, stored and processed at an unprecedented rate. Businesses are utilizing this data to make better decisions, drive greater efficiencies, develop more desirable products, improve profitability and ultimately increase user satisfaction. To continue deriving a high degree of value from a rapidly-expanding data flow, today’s enterprise storage systems are constantly challenged to increase throughput while providing reliable data protection. This white paper highlights key challenges and offers a breakthrough solution that integrates highly innovative 24G SAS products from Samsung and Broadcom.

Serial-attached SCSI, commonly known as SAS, has been an industry standard for moving enterprise data between compute and storage systems, for more than 15 years. Since its introduction in 2004, SAS has proven to be a trusted and sustainable interface for demanding mission-critical workloads due to its high performance, exceptional reliability, remarkable scalability, outstanding flexibility and ease of management. In addition, the SAS ecosystem is well established, offering a wide range of inter-compatible HBAs, RAID adapters, expanders, cables, connectors, and system backplanes.

“SAS continues to be one of the most trusted interfaces thanks to its ability to deliver the capacity, performance, reliability and scalability needed for the most demanding business-critical applications in enterprise data centers,” said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Vice President at IDC. “With a clear roadmap to 24G, IT customers can expect continued enhancements to help data-intensive applications reach new levels of performance.”

As demand for higher performance continues to rise, SAS has kept pace by transitioning from its original 3Gb/s to 12 Gb/s, and now to the latest performance threshold — 24G SAS. In fact, 24G SAS doubles the data throughput of its predecessor, offers improved reliability and is backward-compatible with the legacy infrastructure of 12Gb/s and 6Gb/s SAS, as well as with 6Gb/s SATA devices. It employs the more efficient 128b/130b encoding scheme with 20-bit forward error correction (FEC). This encoding scheme provides considerably better link efficiency at higher speeds. Moreover, FEC allows for detection and correction of transmission errors over high frequencies. With a very high degree of reliability, 20-bit FEC can detect and correct up to 2-bit errors without requiring re-transmission, thereby enabling maximum data throughput even in noisy channels.

By Samsung and Broadcom authors.

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