February 23, 2024

Storage Unpacked 256 – Hyper-scalers and SAS with Rick Kutcipal

33 minutes

In this episode, Chris chats to Rick Kutcipal, “At-Large Director” with the SCSI Trade Association. The topic of conversation is the adoption of SAS media (both HDDs and SSDs) by hyper-scale customers that include public cloud vendors and companies such as Meta. Market perception implies that NVMe-based drives are taking over the world, but that’s far from the truth. As Rick explains, some 90% of exabytes shipped on SSDs and HDDs are still using the SAS interface. SAS scales much better (in terms of drives in systems) than NVMe, while offering a competitive price point when looking at “slot cost”.

There’s a lot of detail to digest in this discussion. It touches on some novel features of HDDs, for example, including Depop and Command Duration Limits. What is clear from the conversation is the longevity of SAS into the future, even as the transition to flash-based media continues.

To learn more about the SCSI Trade Association, check out their website at https://www.snia.org/groups/sta-forum. You can also find them on Linkedin – here.

Elapsed Time: 00:33:09

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros

00:01:30 – Hyper-scalers are big users of SAS devices

00:02:55 – Refresher – What are SAS and SATA?

00:04:55 – What are storage requirements for Hyper-scalers?

00:05:40 – Requirements differ by area (engineers, operations and architects)

00:07:15 – Small percentage savings make a big difference to Hyper-scalers

00:08:45 – SAS scales to thousands of drives, with built-in management

00:10:00 – Certain features have been added specifically for Hyper-scalers

00:12:10 – I/O density continues to decline with HDD capacity increases

00:13:55 – Drive systems can be a mix of NVMe and SAS/SATA drives

00:15:30 – Reliability is critical, to avoid data centre interventions

00:18:15 – Scale is only achievable with SAS

00:19:35 – The supplanting of HDDs by SSDs is debatable

00:21:30 – Large-scale SSDs are seeing the same issue as large HDDs

00:23:30 – Tiering will continue to be important within the storage industry

00:25:00 – Exabytes shipped still shows 90% remains behind SAS infrastructure

00:27:50 – Power comparisons between SSD and HDD are not clear cut

00:29:35 – Hyper-scalers focus on “slot cost”

00:30:30 – What businesses are using SAS solutions – Meta

00:31:55 – Wrap Up

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