Talking About 12Gb/s SAS HBA Card
As storage moves towards sds, virtualization, hyper-convergence, the stability and compatibility of the underlying hardware becomes more and more important. What is the important role of hba in the entire data center, and what is the fundamental difference between hba and raid? Simply put, hba is the physical connection between the internal I/O channel of the server and the I/O channel of the storage system, while raid is a way to combine multiple independent physical disks in different ways to form a logical group. , so as to provide a technology with higher storage performance and data backup capability than a single hard disk. In the Internet companies whose software is defined as the mainstream, the raid technology gradually fades out, and the hba+ software data protection scheme is adopted.
hba does not provide advanced management functions, but supports various commands and various interfaces, and connects various third-party tools of sas. For example, pmc's new hba1000 product supports 12gb/s sas & 6 gb/s sata, supports 16-port direct connection, supports up to 256 sas/sata devices, with x8 pcie gen3 host connector and mini-sas hd cable, Support arcconf cli, extensive linux os, multi-initiator, tlr/multi-lun, ses & ipmi/sgpio, support online firmware and driver updates, support 4k disks, and have drivers larger than 2tb. If the sas cable is replaced with optical fiber, the optical fiber module is also supported. At the same time, the hba1000 product adopts the smart software stack technology, so it also supports the optimization of smr disks. The latest smr storage technology can increase the storage density by 25-100% by overlapping the magnetic tracks, and finally can write 3 trillion bytes of data per square inch, which can reach 10tb on a single disk. Although pmc's hba1000 is a basic hardware, it represents an industry trend, that is, basic hardware with strong compatibility and support for a variety of new technology optimizations.
The evolution of the network and the rapid development of data services have driven the rapid development of the data industry, making the scale of data centers larger and larger. In tens of thousands of servers, tens of thousands of chips, hard disks and many displays are installed. In addition to these servers, There are also a large number of network, storage and other equipment in the data center. These devices will consume a lot of power. The power load of the data center increases exponentially. According to statistics, the cost of electricity accounts for more than 60% of the overall operating cost of the data center. Therefore, Power consumption has become an important challenge faced by data centers. Among all the devices, the power consumption of server devices is the largest, accounting for about 40% of the total power consumption. In the low-level design of server manufacturers, the increase in power consumption leads to an increase in temperature, which accelerates the number of revolutions of the fan and further increases the cost of heat dissipation. pmc calculated an account in its demonstration. The calculation shows that the power consumption of its 12g hba card with 16 external interfaces is 11.1 watts, while the power consumption of products of the same specification on the market is 28.6 watts, and its power consumption is poor. is 17.5 watts. Assuming that at $6 per watt per year, each hba card has a difference of $105 in electricity bills, it is quite objective to calculate the total amount of hba cards used in a data center and the related electricity bill savings.
As we all know, the intel cpu bridge chip performs the function of hba by integrating the sas interface. What are the advantages of pmc's hba1000 card compared to the onboard solution? pmc evaluates hba1000 through 12 pieces of sas ssd, basically can saturate the bandwidth of 12g, and the maximum iops performance can reach 1.3 million. Compared with the bridge chip solution, the performance advantage of the independent hba card is still very significant, and the difference here is especially significant when the sas ssd is connected. The data shows that the throughput of using the hba 1000 card is 2.5 times that of using the bridge chip. In terms of io, the random read performance is 85% higher than that of the bridge chip connection disk. Objectively speaking, the bridge chip integration solution is more economical, and the target market and users are different from the independent 12g hba card. http://feiyi.51dzw.com/
Finally, in terms of application scenarios, the current needs of enterprise-level users are diversified. Whether it is external jbod to the server or internal ssd/hdd, a more flexible configuration scheme is required. Therefore, the 8i8e in the hba 1000 provides 8 external ports and 8 internal ports. The flexibility of realizing such ports through a single chip is unique to pmc and has attracted the attention of many enterprise-level users.
