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T10 Committee Forwards Specification to INCITS
San Francisco, May 20, 2003 – The SCSI Trade Association (STA),
a member-run industry consortium established to support and promote SCSI technology,
announced today that the Serial Attached SCSI 1.0 specification was forwarded
on May 8 by the T10 Committee to the InterNational Committee for Information Technology
Standards (INCITS). The specification will be circulated by INCITS for public
review and comment followed by a letter ballot, both key milestones on the path
to becoming an international standard.
The Serial Attached SCSI specification defines a device-level enterprise storage
interface incorporating SCSI backward compatibility, serial point-to-point interconnections,
dual porting, increased addressability and the ability to scale to small form
factors. Its physical layer has been engineered to be compatible with Serial ATA’s
physical layer, giving users the choice of populating their systems with Serial
Attached SCSI or Serial ATA hard disk drives, or a combination of both. Compatibility
of the two specifications will be assured, as T10 had the advantage of working
with selected parts of the Serial ATA 2.0 specification provided by the Serial
ATA II Working Group.
Harry Mason, President of the STA Board of Directors and Director of Industry
Marketing at LSI Logic, stated, “The Serial Attached SCSI specification continues
its predicted development and review schedule. OEMs are working hard on their
product designs and early demos. The industry is starting to see Serial Attached
SCSI demos andby fall there will be more as companies prepare their products for
introduction in 2004.”
“T10 forwarded Serial Attached SCSI to INCITS at our May 8, 2003 meeting,
where it will go through a 45-day public review period,” said John Lohmeyer,
Chair of the T10 Technical Committee and Principal Engineer, LSI Logic. “If
there are no comments, INCITS will issue a letter ballot and barring comments,
it then goes to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). “I view
Serial Attached SCSI as technically stable and we are on track for ANSI publication
of the standard by late summer,” he added.
Dave Reinsel, Hard Disk Drive Research Manager at IDC, said, “When Serial
Attached SCSI enters the enterprise storage market in 2004, it should carry the
robust reliability for which SCSI is well known. Its expected compatibility with
Serial ATA will be a market advantage for current, as well as new SCSI users,
who want the flexibility of both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA hard drives
in a Serial Attached SCSI system.”
STA will schedule ‘plugfests’ (test labs) in 1Q 2004, in cooperation
with the University of New Hampshire, to provide STA members with the opportunity
to test all newly developed Serial Attached SCSI products for compatibility with
Serial ATA and for interoperability. The broad array of products to enter the
market in 2004 will come from STA member companies which produce controllers,
host bus adaptors, hard disk drives, cables, connectors, systems, software, expanders,
converters, switches, I/O and test and verification systems. Enterprise users
will be able to confidently continue investing in SCSI technology that delivers
a scalable feature set and robust reliability.
About STA
The SCSI Trade Association was established in 1995 to provide a focal
point for members to communicate the benefits of SCSI to the industry.
STA promotes the understanding and use of SCSI technology and influences
the evolution of SCSI standards to meet future industry needs. As of January
2002, STA supports and promotes Serial Attached SCSI as well as Parallel
SCSI. The Association has an eight-member Board of Directors, which oversees
Marketing Communications, Technology Committees and all STA activities.
For more information, please visit the STA web site at http://www.scsita.org,
send an email to info@scsita.org, call the STA office at (415) 561-6273
or send a fax to (415) 561-6120.
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