Nearline SAS Positioning

End-to-End SAS Technology

Nearline SAS drives add proven enterprise SAS interface drive electronics to the same SATA hard disk assembly (HDA) hardware

While the mechanical platform is the same, the difference is in the electronics

SAS Electronics with dual port SAS connection

Nearline SAS

SAS leverages the same Hard Disk Assembly as SATA

SATA Electronics with single port SATA connection

SATA

True dual porting provides failover support to the drive

Reliability

Eliminates the need for a SAS-to-SATA interposer eliminating a single point of failure
Additional hardware required on SATA drives to be accommodated within a storage system
Each SATA interposer adds two additional connectors and a physical interconnection to the storage system, which has been found to be a leading cause of failures*

SATA drive in CRU with interposer

NL-SAS drive in CRU

Streamlines system integration with a single part

* Source: USNIX Conference Study http://www.usenix.org/event/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang.pdf

Reliability

NL-SAS drives reduce data corruption with end-to-end initiator-target nexus checking (IOECC/IOEDC)
IO error detection (IOEDC) verifies data content and location
IO error correction (IOECC) corrects data errors on reads and writes
SATA only corrects on writes

This ensures that data traveling to or from the drive is not misdirected.
SATA drives lack the native addressability required to do this function

Reliability - Futures

Next generation nearline SAS (3TB 3.5-in, 1TB 2.5-in) will support industry standard T10 Protection Information (PI)
Industry data protection standard
T10PI implementation (SafeStore Data Assurance) checks data during any internal transfer providing greater fault isolation.

Benefits:
Data protection with Cyclic Redundany Check (CRC) validation along entire data path
End-to-End Data Integrity reduces silent data corruption events Greater dependability with data corruption detection prior to data being written to disk Improved isolation of device causing data corruption

SATA drives will not be capable of implementing T10 PI.

Performance
Storage Performance Council 2 (SPC-2) benchmarks three workloads including large file processing, database inquiries and video-on demand The higher the throughput, the better IOPs
SPC-2 Benchmark Results Concurrent Sequential Transfers
67 56 56
Seagate 1TB SATA

Nearline SAS drives can improve performance up to 64%!!

75

80

40
34 32 24 29 28 28

44

47 29

Seagate 1TB SAS Competitor A SATA

19 17 14

24

26

Competitor B SATA Competitor C SATA

Large File Processing Large Database Query

Video On Demand

Composite Throughput MB/s

Performs 50 to 64% better than SATA drives in SPC-1 results which test a single predominately I/O workload
*Published Storage Performance Council (SPC) benchmark results

Additional Feature Option

NL-SAS drives are offered with a drive-level encryption option, or self-encrypting drives (SEDs)
Data is secure at the most basic level the hard drive

Unparalleled security assurance with government-grade encryption

Data is protected through the hardware lifecycle

SAN
SafeStore Local Key Management

Authentication Key Flow

Data Flow

MDSM Key Management manages these SEDs

Nearline SAS the Enterprise Storage Choice

Take it to the next level with nearline SAS technology!
Self Encrypting Drive Option End-to-End SAS Infrastructure Future T10 PI Support

Enhanced Performance
Improved Data Integrity Eliminates Additional Connectors

Native Dual Porting for Dual Controller Failover

SATA