Monday 5 November 2007

USP-V does SATA

So the rumours (here and here) are true. Here's the announcement to prove it. HDS are going to support 750GB SATA II drives in the USP.

This is an interesting position HDS are taking as thin provisioning will be able to take use of the enhanced drive capacity making the USP-V even more efficient than the DMX-4 with SATA drives.

However I do wonder whether HDS have been pushed into supporting SATA on the USP-V. I was under the impression that thin provisioning on external drives (the standard HDS line - use External SATA storage rather than configuring it within the USP itself) wasn't going to be available in the initial release. Perhaps HDS had to support SATA in order to get best usage out of the thin provisioning option and to answer customer complaints about using thin provisioning with expensive storage.

What I'd like to see next is how HDS will now position internal versus external storage. At what point do externally connected SATA drives become more cost effective than internal ones? This announcement seems to muddy the waters from that perspective.

I imagine we will get an announcement from Hu explaining how logical it is and how it is all part of the ongoing strategy....

2 comments:

Owen Hollands said...

Apparently this release will support both internal SATA, and thin provisioning of external storage. I don't see how this means that they have been pushed into offering internal SATA because they can't provide this feature, but I do agree it makes working out the cheaper option difficult.

Chris M Evans said...

aDept, that's good news, perhaps HDS weren't pushed into offering this feature then. As mentioned previously, HDS should come out and make it clear when internal vs external drives should be used. I think also it is worth customers measuring the cost of an "internal" slot versus external storage - which would be the cost of the external array plus the ports on the switch/USP that would be used.