So I have been reading other storage industry pundits’ opinions on the uses for LC-FC (Low Cost Fibre Channel Disk) and ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) disk drives.? The? use of ATA disks in mid-tier storage devices and virtual tape libraries as a primary disk-to-disk backup (D2D) and/or archiving target has become quite pervasive.? While the drives lack some fibre channel (FC) features like tagged command queuing and the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) is not as high as a fibre channel drives they work well in applications like backup-to-disk (B2D) due to their ability to achieve tolerable sequential read and write speeds.? The industry as a whole has now begun to leverage LC-FC disks in enterprise class storage subsystems, while fundamentally this is a great idea, the marketing and packaging of these solutions needs a bit of work.? Most enterprise class subsystems leverage platform software for functions like snapshots and replication, many vendors price these platform software applications by capacity.? Why would anyone install 500GB LC-FC drives in an enterprise class subsystem and push their platform software licensing through the roof.? It would more cost effectively purchase a mid-tier storage device with 15K rpm fibre channel drives to use as a tier 2 or 3 storage platform, this solution would also most likely be higher performing.? This is a fundamental problem, if a storage device can truly accommodate multi-tier storage requirements why should the addition of tier 2 or tier 3 storage capacity where functionality like synchronous or asynchronous replication are typically not required raise the cost of my platform software licensing?? Until this is resolved it will be difficult to realize the vision of a single multi-tier platform.

-RJB