Serial ATA starts to filter into enterprise

MARKET RESEARCH firm iSuppli said that Serial ATA is beginning to make inroads into the corporate marketplace. But such systems may only represent one third of enterprise class data systems even by 2007, iSuppli cautioned. The report, SATA RAIDs the Enterprise, said that big storage vendors such as EMC, IBM, Sun and others who formerly were committed to fibre channel and SCSI, are now offering ATA systems as part of their product lineup.

EMC, for example, sells the CX200 storage system and that supports both fibre channel and Serial ATA. The system is, however, resold by Dell in a S-ATA recension. While that's low end to EMC, it's high end to Dell, the report points out, and S-ATA is already being adopted in enterprise data centre systems and network attached storage systems.

S-ATA, says iSuppli, has advantages over the parallel ATA systems including better speed, cabling and integration features. However, last year, most S-ATA drives that shipped were bridge solutions, that is to say ATA hard drives with a S-ATA conversion chip. The exception was Seagate, and Intel is already supporting S-ATA in its chipsets.

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