Right Place, Right Drive
There’s More To An Enterprise Drive
What's this
Similar findings were observed by Weihang Jiang, et. al., from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the paper "Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?" (http://bit.ly/M2AULz). After assessing 1.8 million disks over 44 months, the authors found that "near-line systems, which mostly use SATA disks, experience about 1.9% AFR for disks, while for low-end, mid-range, and high-end systems, which mostly use FC disks, the AFR for disks is under 0.9%. This observation is consistent with the common belief that enterprise disks (FC) are more reliable than near-line disks (SATA)."
In recent years, much of the enterprise drive market has transitioned from Fibre Channel to Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS). The reasons why SCSI protocol-based drives experience such markedly lower failure rates are complex, but these and other studies show that enterprise-class design and firmware do yield markedly superior results. Businesses wanting the most reliable data integrity need to be standardizing on SAS architecture.
Enterprise managers understand how to think beyond the limits of a 12-month warranty and a price tag. If a 2TB Constellation ES.2 6 Gb/s SAS drive costs three times the price of a 2TB Barracuda SATA desktop drive, but the Constellation will deliver several times as much work over the course of its life while also costing hundreds of dollars less in both energy and servicing expenses, which is more appropriate solution for an IT environment? Desktop drives are suited to desktop systems. They are round pegs that do not belong in the square holes of data center enclosures.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to an enterprise drive than meets the eye. The innovation poured into these more robust designs are what modern data centers need for their high-capacity applications and what IT managers should be looking for in order to demonstrate ROI benefits that exceed expectations and help bolster the organization’s bottom line.