Implemention of RAID Storage Structure

Over the last few years, storage manufacturers have introduced ATA RAID controllers as a budget-minded alternative to the entrenched SCSI RAID. Hard-drive makers turned out products with faster motors and larger buffers, hoping to close the performance gap with SCSI drives. Yet hurdles remained.
This was among the driving forces behind the development of the Serial ATA standard, which showed potential to address these issues. Now in its second revision, SATA is delivering what system builders have sought for years: good performance at an affordable price.
But the SCSI standard has not remained stagnant, either. Serial technology is everywhere. The newest SCSI standard—called Serial Attached SCSI, or SAS—is perhaps the ultimate convergence of ATA and SCSI technologies.
How does this benefit the server system builder? Let's find out by taking a look at SATA-II and SAS. Then, we'll build a RAID-capable server with SATA-II drives that can later be migrated to SAS drives while still preserving our hardware investment and without the need to rebuild the entire system from the inside out.
Summary of the Technologies
SATA-II offers some important improvements over the original SATA hardware standard. The SATA-II Working Group sought during development to ensure physical compatibility with upcoming SAS interfaces, and an agreement was worked out with the SCSI Trade Association to make this happen. This is an important reason why system builders now have the option of running SATA-II drives or SAS drives on the same backplane. SATA-II also carries forward the main improvements of SATA which are low cost, simplified cabling and connections, and backward compatibility for drivers and software.
SAS is the other side of the "convergence equation." The SAS standard and the protocols within it is what enables communications between SATA drives and SAS controllers. There are actually three different protocols available to SAS. These protocols are known as Serial SCSI Protocol (SSP), SCSI Management Protocol (SMP), and SATA Tunneled Protocol (STP). As you might imagine, SSP transfers SCSI commands across the data link to a drive, while SMP sends management information to an expander attached to the controller.
The real beauty, however, is STP. This is what enables SATA commands to be sent from an SAS controller to a SATA drive. Since the SAS connections are point-to-point instead of shared, we can have SATA-II drives and SAS drives installed within the same enclosure, and the controller can successfully negotiate the connection.
To the system builder who handles servers, RAID is not an option, it's a requirement. While increasing the number of drives in the system increases performance, it also introduces additional points of failure. This became a bigger problem with ATA RAID systems in the past, due to a longer error recovery process and lower Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) specs than SCSI drives. Also a problem for early ATA RAID systems was the lack of true hot-swap capability. Manufacturers are now addressing these issues with their versions of SATA and SATA-II drives designed specifically for use in RAID systems. This enables the system builder to create SATA RAID systems that are viable in production environments and are better able to compete with SCSI arrays. The convergence of SATA-II and SAS takes this concept to the next level.
Ingredients
For our recipe, we will use components from Adaptec and Maxtor. Here's what you'll need:
Drive Enclosure: I recommend Adaptec's 335SAS, which fits four 3.5-inch SATA or SATA-II or SAS hard drives into the space of three consecutive 5.25-inch half-height chassis bays. This unit is available in either beige or black, with an MSRP of just under $370. Outstanding features of the 335SAS include: support for enclosure management, integrated cooling fan, redundant power connectors, and hot-swap capability. Here's a look at the Adaptec 335SAS drive enclosure:

Controller: Also from Adaptec is the 4800SAS RAID controller, which is an 8-port controller supporting SATA or SATA-II or SAS drives. This model, with an MSRP of $945, supports standard RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50, plus Adaptec's advanced RAID levels 1E, 5EE, and 60. The 4800SAS card has a PCI-X bus interface, which has excellent backward compatibility with existing PCI slots. A PCI-X card can be installed in a system with a 64-bit 66 MHz PCI slot or even a 32-bit PCI slot, in addition to the 64-bit 133 MHz or 100 MHz slots. The PCI bus interface is almost ubiquitous now; therefore, a PCI-X card such as this can be used to upgrade an existing platform with an open PCI slot on the motherboard. For new systems where this type of backward compatibility is not a concern, Adaptec's 4805SAS controller has a PCI-Express x8 interface and otherwise identical specifications. Here's a look at the Adaptec 4800SAS RAID controller:

Hard Drives: I recommend the Maxtor MaXLine Pro 500, which is a 500 GB, 7200-rpm SATA-II drive with a 16 MB buffer. This is an enterprise-class drive with improved Error Detection and Recovery features to improve reliability in RAID systems. The MSRP is around $300 each, giving this product an excellent price-to-performance ratio. Here's a look at the Maxtor MaXLine Pro 500:

Window's Vista.

If you've been wondering why Windows Vista has taken a long time to reach Beta 1, we can now tell you why: there are seven separate editions of Vista headed your way. OK, that's not the reason for the delay, but how else do you introduce that many OS versions, without invoking Snow White & friends? Join me now as I romp through the various editions, many of which you'll see are just barely differentiated.

First up, there's Starter Edition, which like XP Starter Edition, is a crippled (and lame) product aimed at the two-thirds world. It will limit users to three concurrent applications, and provide only basic TCP/IP networking, and won't be suitable for most games. The next step up is Home Basic Edition, which is really the sibling to today's Windows XP Home. However, as the name suggests, there's also Home Premium Edition, and this is where we start to split features like hairs and create a gaggle of products. HPE will build on the the Basic Edition by adding, most notably, the next-generation of Media Center capabilities, including support for HDTV, DVD authoring, and even DVD ripping backed up (of course) by Windows DRM. For non-corporate types, this is probably going to be the OS that most people use. It's similar to XP Pro in power, but with all of the added bells and whistles for entertainment. Well, most of them.
Windows Vista Professional Edition won't occupy the same spot that XP Pro occupies today, because this time it's truly aimed at businesses. It won't feature the MCE functionality that Home Premium Edition has, but it begins to provide the kind of functionality you'd expect in a business environment, such as support for non-Microsoft networking protocols and Domain support. But don't expect too many businesses to necessarily turn to PE. Microsoft is also planning both a Small Business Edition and an Enterprise Edition, which build upon pro by adding (seemingly minor) features aimed at appealing to each market. SBE, for instance, includes a networked backup solution, while EE will include things like Virtual PC integration, and the ability to encrypt an entire volume of information.
Last but not least, there's Ultimate Edition. Hey, I'm just glad that they didn't call it Extreme Edition. I'll leave it to Paul Thurrott, who has all of the details, to explain (and promote) this beast:

The best operating system ever offered for a personal PC, optimized for the individual. Windows Vista Ultimate Edition is a superset of both Vista Home Premium and Vista Pro Edition, so it includes all of the features of both of those product versions, plus adds Game Performance Tweaker with integrated gaming experiences, a Podcast creation utility (under consideration, may be cut from product), and online "Club" services (exclusive access to music, movies, services and preferred customer care) and other offerings (also under consideration, may be cut from product). Microsoft is still investigating how to position its most impressive Windows release yet, and is looking into offering Ultimate Edition owners such services as extended A1 subscriptions, free music downloads, free movie downloads, Online Spotlight and entertainment software, preferred product support, and custom themes. There is nothing like Vista Ultimate Edition today. This version is aimed at high-end PC users and technology influencers, gamers, digital media enthusiasts, and students.

One final note worth mentioning is that this strategy does remove the "corporate Windows XP" option from the hands of pirates. Volume licensing for Pro, SBE, and EE may still mean that there will be copies of Windows Vista out there that don't "call home" for Windows Product Activation, but as you can see, Microsoft has removed most of the features that most pirates would want from those OSes. You won't see corporate licensing versions of Ultimate Edition.

Intel's vision with Dual-core

In April of 2005, Intel announced its Intel® Pentium® processor Extreme Edition, featuring Intel® dual-core processor, which can provide immediate advantages for people looking to buy systems that boost multitasking computing power and improve the throughput of multithreaded applications. An Intel dual-core processor consists of two complete execution cores in one physical processor, both running at the same frequency. Both cores share the same packaging and the same interface with the chipset/memory. Overall, an Intel dual-core processor offers a way of delivering more capabilities while balancing energy-efficient performance, and is the first step in the multi-core processor future.

An Intel dual-core processor-based PC will enable new computing experiences as it delivers value by providing additional computing resources that expand the PC's capabilities in the form of higher throughput and simultaneous computing. Imagine that a dual-core processor is like a four-lane highway—it can handle up to twice as many cars as its two-lane predecessor without making each car drive twice as fast. Similarly, with an Intel dual-core processor-based PC, people can perform multiple tasks such as downloading music and gaming simultaneously.

And when combined with Hyper-Threading Technology¹ (HT Technology) the Intel dual-core processor is the next step in the evolution of high-performance computing. Intel dual-core products supporting Hyper-Threading Technology can process four software threads simultaneously by more efficiently using resources that otherwise may sit idle.By introducing its first dual-core processor for desktop PCs, Intel continues its commitment and investment in PC innovation as enthusiasts are running ever-more demanding applications.

A new Intel dual-core processor-based PC gives people the flexibility and performance to handle robust content creation or intense gaming, plus simultaneously managing background tasks such as virus scanning and downloading. Cutting-edge gamers can play the latest titles and experience ultra-realistic effects and game play. Entertainment enthusiasts will be able to create and improve digital content while encoding other content in the background.The new Intel® Core™ Duo processors have ushered in a new era in processor architecture design in which multi-core processors become the standard for delivering greater performance, improved performance per watt, and new capabilities across Intel's desktop, mobile, and server platforms. The Intel dual-core products also represent a vital first step on the road to realizing Platform 2015, Intel's vision for the future of computing and the evolving processor and platform architectures that support it.