New systems not so accommodating of SAS as before?

[ullbeking]

I've been browsing new Supermicro boards, Xeon-E, Xeon D-2100, new X11's, etc, and I noticed something very interesting... although it could just be my imagination.

It seems to me that not many new systems have SAS capabilities, just SATA. I wonder if it's a sign of things to come... but that's precisely what makes me doubt what I see, because SAS still has a LOT of use cases left in it and won't be made obsolete for a long time, IMO.

I've just become keenly interested in SAS and its capabilities, but that isn't so relevant here. What IS relevant is that backplanes on the new SuperServers are all about SATA not SAS.

Has anybody else noticed this or is it my imagination?

 

[Evan]

SAS is not going anywhere fast, the top tier vendors like dell and HPE love SAS as they have the own controllers and they handles the raid, it’s a point of difference in their sales to enterprise.

Supermicro for example tends to sell a lot more to smaller cloud providers etc that don’t value these features in the same way.

I would have predicted;
SATA for low power
NVMe/PCIe for everything else

But as mentioned above mirroring issues.

Even low power SATA is going, NVMe all he way even low power and cheap storage it’s becoming available and preferred.

 

[BeTeP]

I think it is a temporary thing. At this point the 6Gbps controllers are too old already and the 12Gbps ones are still too expensive to be included with the new products. It makes sense to the motherboard manufacturers to include a feature like an onboard SAS controller when it adds less than 5% to the manufacturing cost of a unit. Not so much when it adds 20%.

 

[Evan]

Your not referring to SATA express are you ? That’s just PCIe/NVMe in a common socket,
No SATA4 will see the light of day as I know, all signs point to NVMe from here on I feel.

 

[TRACKER]

Something similar happened with 10GBase-T unfortunately. If we compare SATA3 to 1Gbps Gbase-T and SAS3 to 10GBase-T situation looks similar in terms of market penetration and integration with on-board solutions.