Section 2.8. Summary | Inside Windows Storage: Server Storage Technologies for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Beyond

2.8 Summary

The SCSI standard has been evolving over the years , and several standards exist. SCSI standards have evolved remarkably in terms of higher data transfer speeds. The user needs to compromise between having a higher number of SCSI devices connected to a bus and having fewer devices that may exist farther away. SCSI standards have also evolved in terms of defining more advanced commands, such as the Extended Copy command.

ATA/IDE standards, performance, and reliability have also evolved and are still evolving.

LUN masking in Windows NT may be accomplished in the HBA driver written by the HBA vendor.

Windows Server 2003 introduces a new Storport driver that augments the older SCSIPort driver. The newer Storport driver is meant for use by higher-performance/capability devices such as SCSI-3 and Fibre Channel devices. Compared to the older SCSIPort driver, the Storport driver provides remarkably higher performance, improved manageability, and improved error handling. Vendors may get all benefits of the newer Storport model by rewriting their driver or may get some benefits of the newer Storport model by doing minimal work and relinking their existing driver with Storport (instead of with SCSIPort).

The industry evolved from servers with direct-attached storage to a client/server paradigm with multiple servers on the LAN. In the latter scenario, some servers were dedicated to applications such as running a database application, while other servers were dedicated to serving storage needs. These servers dedicated to serving storage needs were dubbed network-attached storage servers, and that is the focus of the next chapter.

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