Lessons Learned

Unfortunately, what little I do know about SATA, and specifically SATA RAID, has been at the hands of those who have tried to implement SATA in environments where it's really not ready to perform, notably as fault-tolerant disk storage on business-class servers. This seems like a wonderful solution to businesses who are wanting to upgrade or expand their disk storage capacity but don't have a very large budget. And on the face of it, this appears to be a technology that will fit very nicely between the very expensive but reliable SCSI and the inexpensive but questionable IDE formats. But is the technology really mature enough for use in business environments? I don't think so.

Here's a telling sign. I was speaking with an associate who supports large enterprise server installations for a major software company. I had been asked about some problems with a SATA RAID controller and could one of the drives from a mirrored set on the SATA RAID controller be moved to a different SATA controller that was not RAID aware. After asking my question several different ways, I finally realized he had no idea what I was really saying. So I asked him point blank - "Do you know what SATA is?" You can probably guess the answer.

So if large enterprise systems aren't using SATA as the foundation for their drive storage, why are smaller businesses? Two factors. One is cost, which I've already mentioned earlier. SATA costs less than SCSI, and appears to have the same usability as SCSI disk in that you can attach the drives to a RAID controller and set them up in mirrored or striped sets like you do with SCSI. The other is that system manufacturers are really beginning to push SATA with their low-end server systems. Look at any of the small-dollar server products from the major manufacturers and you'll see that they offer SATA drives on them. Even those who choose to build their own systems are finding it hard to get an inexpensive server-capable system board that doesn't have an SATA controller on it. But does that mean that's the way you should go?

Not yet. SATA technology is still immature. It's still developing. Even though larger-name companies are beinning to offer SATA products under their marks, this technology is still in its infancy. Many of the controllers available for these server systems still do not have Windows 2003 server certified drivers available. In many cases, you're able to load the server with the Windows 2000 or Windows XP drivers, but even those have not passed Microsoft certification.

Which leads me to one of my pet peeves - people who adopt a "make do" approach to their business servers. Think about it - this box, or set of boxes, usually comprises the core of the business operation. So the best approache to make sure that core business functions are always available is to use parts that aren't necessarily compatible with the hardware or software running on the server. Huh?

This reminds me of a situation with a former employer: A group of admins were all running AOL Instant Messenger on their workstations. About once a week, we'd get a call that something they needed to run on their systems wasn't working, and we'd go up and do nothing other than uninstall AIM, restart, and bang, the tool or process that wasn't working before now started working again. This went on for months until I had a chance to discuss the situation with one of the company bigwigs. When I first broached the subject with him, he started to roll his eyes at me, but once I explained how he might be called into a meeting to presend a PowerPoint slide deck that his admin couldn't get printed out because AIM was interfering with the network connection, he very quickly banned AIM from his group, and the number of support calls for his group dropped dramatically.

This is business, folks. If it doesn't help move the business along or, god forbid, it gets in the way of getting business done, then don't use it. Period.

SATA RAID will probably become a usable server technology, but it's not there yet. Until then, it's great to play with, but please don't use it in a production environment.