Comments on: 8-gig era officially begins

By: eraser’s blog » Blog Archive » 8-gig era officially begins

eraser’s blog » Blog Archive » 8-gig era officially begins — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:29:42 +0000

[...] By Dave Raffo QLogic says its 8Gb PCI-Express HBAs and 8-gig switches are available as a Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit and from QLogic distributors. Although other vendors claim to have 8-gig devices, QLogic marketing … storage.blogs.techtarget.com Storage Soup storage.blogs.techtarget.com [...]

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:07:53 +0000

This solution is priced agressively by HP, below current 4Gb offerings in some cases. The arguement for new SAN customers then becomes why not 8Gb? There are also other things to look at with the HP solution such as the management software and scalability over previous simple SAN kits from HP.

By: Jesse G.

Jesse G. — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:12:38 +0000

Probably - marketing is a powerful force. I would say that if EMC asks Seagate to produce an 8GBit disk it will happen, EMC is probably Seagate’s single largest customer in the grand scheme of things. (With HDS a close second)

And I’ll give you a hint. EMC Engineering is not going to be the driving force, EMC Marketing will be. Their favourite words are “First to market with….” (fill in the blank)

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:06:07 +0000

So, then the question is, will the array vendors “play the marketing game” and include 8Gb enclosure backplanes on their roadmap for SSD or HDD (even if it is just for marketing’s sake)?

Is this a chicken and egg problem? I imagine if drives had 8Gb FC interfaces array vendors would wind up supporting it at least in a portion of their array and vice-versa.

By: Jesse G.

Jesse G. — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:42:37 +0000

4. Apparently storage geeks sometimes forget how to count.

By: Jesse G.

Jesse G. — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:37:46 +0000

Because most hard-drive vendors are aware of two things.

1. Most users don’t even utilize the 1Gbit they had originally. Going to 2BGit and then 4Gbit is pure marketing. The “Bigger-better-faster-more” crowd loves it.
2. Cached disk arrays that spread the IO load across the back end means that even if the switch-to-array speed is 8G, the distributed IO won’t even approach the 4G point.

3. Drive transfer rates don’t even come remotely close to the 8G limit, so when writing to a disk you’re still at the mercy of the physical limitations of the drive. The only exception to this *MIGHT* be in the case of Tier-0 or SSD disks, where the Solid State nature of the drive enables massive ultra-fast transfers.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:05:14 +0000

Why no interest from the hard drive vendors?