Value SAS: Enterprise Class Storage for Everyone
With SATA interfaces peaking in performance and no future speed improvments planned, Value SAS (vSAS) offers a solid replacement of enterprise SATA SSDs in most server applications.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) today supports the broadest range of media from the most cost effective optical and tape solutions to high-performance flash storage technologies. Value SAS SSDs hits yet another cost and performance target in that spectrum and is positioned to be a potential replacement technology for 6G SATA SSDs. SAS infrastructure products now support these Value SAS SSDs from two key industry leaders – KIOXIA and Seagate.
The cost-effectiveness of SATA SSDs has enabled the technology to become well-established and broadly deployed. Value SAS SSDs provide a future roadmap for 6G SATA SSDs – which may be facing increased technology headwinds in the near future. The SATA interface standard’s highest data rate is 6G with no future speed improvements planned. As flash media data rates increase and overall storage system performance requirements advance, that 6G rate may be a bottleneck in some server and storage applications. Given that limitation, end point manufacturers may introduce fewer new SATA SSD product offerings, or even not at all.
Value SAS delivers that next step for 6G SATA SSD customers with an interface upgrade to a single port of full-duplex 12G. Value SAS SSDs are tailored to be cost effective with a specific range of capacity and endurance levels just beyond enterprise SATA SSD solutions of today. Additional capabilities are available to make the deployment more secure – such as sanitize instant erase (SIE), self-encrypting drive support (SED), security certification options (FIPS 140-2) – and higher performing – with performance-increasing queue depths well beyond the 32 supported with SATA.
Enterprise 12G SAS SSDs are a step beyond Value SAS with yet higher performance, reliability and manageability, while providing dual SAS ports for redundancy or further increased bandwidth.
Value SAS drives are available in the market now, with product offerings from two top tier drive partners, Seagate and KIOXIA. These Value SAS products offer a sweet spot SSD solution particularly for server environments where the highest-performing and fault-tolerant storage is not required, yet reliability, security and capacity requirements cannot be met by SATA solutions. Microchip Adaptec® HBA and RAID solutions natively support Value SAS offerings today, with close collaboration and testing with our partner drive suppliers. Microchip’s SAS/SATA controller products, including the Adaptec SmartRAID 3100 family of adapters, now support Value SAS SSD products. Deploying a SAS topology using Value SAS with Adaptec Storage Solutions makes for a perfect upgrade from SATA SSDs. For more information about Microchip SAS/SATA adapters supporting Value SAS SSDs, please refer to our Adaptec Compatibility Reports.