Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA) [1] or FC-ATA is a type of computer hard disk drive. FATA is simply a low cost ATA or SATA disk drive equipped with a small external converter that bridges the interface to Fibre Channel (FC). This allows users to use the disk in an enterprise-class disk enclosure, at about half of the cost of a native FC drive (cost per gigabyte of capacity).
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Small Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced in the 1980s and has seen widespread use on servers and high-end workstations, with new SCSI standards being published as recently as SAS-4 in 2017.
Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. iSCSI facilitates data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. It can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.
Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data centers.
In computer hardware a host controller, host adapter or host bus adapter (HBA) connects a computer system bus which acts as the host system to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, SAS, NVMe, Fibre Channel and SATA devices. Devices for connecting to FireWire, USB and other devices may also be called host controllers or host adapters.
A disk array controller is a device that manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It often implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. It also often provides additional disk cache.
Clariion is a discontinued SAN disk array manufactured and sold by EMC Corporation, it occupied the entry-level and mid-range of EMC's SAN disk array products. In 2011, EMC introduced the EMC VNX Series, designed to replace both the Clariion and Celerra products.
Xserve RAID is a attachment mass-storage server that was offered by Apple Inc.
ATA over Ethernet (AoE) is a network protocol developed by the Brantley Coile Company, designed for simple, high-performance access of block storage devices over Ethernet networks. It is used to build storage area networks (SANs) with low-cost, standard technologies.
A NetApp FAS is a computer storage product by NetApp running the ONTAP operating system; the terms ONTAP, AFF, ASA, FAS are often used as synonyms. "Filer" is also used as a synonym although this is not an official name. There are three types of FAS systems: Hybrid, All-Flash, and All SAN Array:
A SCSI connector is used to connect computer parts that communicate with each other via the SCSI standard. Generally, two connectors, designated male and female, plug together to form a connection which allows two components, such as a computer and a disk drive, to communicate with each other. SCSI connectors can be electrical connectors or optical connectors. There have been a large variety of SCSI connectors in use at one time or another in the computer industry. Twenty-five years of evolution and three major revisions of the standards resulted in requirements for Parallel SCSI connectors that could handle an 8, 16 or 32 bit wide bus running at 5, 10 or 20 megatransfer/s, with conventional or differential signaling. Serial SCSI added another three transport types, each with one or more connector types. Manufacturers have frequently chosen connectors based on factors of size, cost, or convenience at the expense of compatibility.
ATTO Technology, Inc. is a manufacturer of storage connectivity products for data-intensive computing. ATTO manufactures Fibre Channel and SAS/SATA host bus adapters, RAID adapters, Fibre Channel switches, protocol conversion bridges, storage controllers, MacOS iSCSI initiator software and acceleration software with storage interface connectivity to SATA, SAS, Fibre Channel, Thunderbolt devices, Ethernet and NVMe.
Z-SAN is a proprietary type of storage area network licensed by Zetera corporation. Z-SAN hardware is bundled with a modified version of SAN-FS, which is a shared disk file system driver and management software product SAN File System (SFS) made by DataPlow. The shared disk file system allows multiple computers to access the same volume at block level. Zetera calls their version of the file system Z-SAN.
On Linux, network block device (NBD) is a network protocol that can be used to forward a block device from one machine to a second machine. As an example, a local machine can access a hard disk drive that is attached to another computer.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks while preserving the Fibre Channel protocol. The specification was part of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards T11 FC-BB-5 standard published in 2009. FCoE did not see widespread adoption.
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN).
IBM Storwize systems were virtualizing RAID computer data storage systems with raw storage capacities up to 32 PB. Storwize is based on the same software as IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
The Linux-IOTarget (LIO) is an open-source Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) target implementation included with the Linux kernel.
The Dell blade server products are built around their M1000e enclosure that can hold their server blades, an embedded EqualLogic iSCSI storage area network and I/O modules including Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand switches.
Hard disk drives are accessed over one of a number of bus types, including parallel ATA, Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel. Bridge circuitry is sometimes used to connect hard disk drives to buses with which they cannot communicate natively, such as IEEE 1394, USB, SCSI, NVMe and Thunderbolt.