News & Events - STA Member Release

Editorial Contacts: Lea Schwartz Point Public Relations 970-225-3753 pointpr@qwest.net

SERIAL ATTACHED SCSI LETTER BALLOT RELEASED BY T10

Letter Ballot Achieves Commitment to Deliver Speficifiation to Industry On-time

San Francisco, CA, December 9, 2002 - The SCSI Trade Association (STA), a member-run consortium established to support and promote SCSI technology, announced today that the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) Technical Committee T10, has completed its work on the Serial Attached SCSI specification and has released the letter ballot. The letter ballot marks a significant milestone in the standardization process and meets the year-end forecast established by working committees over a year ago. In addition to the significance of this event in formalizing the specification, it also marks the beginning of the implementation phase of Serial Attached SCSI during which companies will solidify their designs.

The Serial Attached SCSI standard 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 is compatible with Serial ATA (SATA), giving future users the choice of populating their systems with SCSI or SATA hard disk drives or a combination of both. Enterprise users will be able to confidently continue investing in SCSI technology that delivers a scalable feature set and robust reliability.

Harry Mason, President of the STA Board of Directors and Director of Industry Marketing at LSI Logic, stated, "This is an important milestone on the path to Serial Attached SCSI's standardization and we anticipate that products will be released to the market in early 2004. Enterprise storage users will have the unprecedented choice of SCSI or SATA hard disk drives in a Serial Attached SCSI system plus the comfort of familiar SCSI software and middleware."

John Monroe, a Vice President at Gartner Dataquest commented, "Market acceptance of Serial Attached SCSI by major OEM accounts seems promising. If qualifications go smoothly, SAS will gain significant ground in 2004 and become a substantial part of the enterprise market in 2005 and 2006."

"Developing the Serial Attached SCSI draft standard has been a rewarding and challenging experience for T10 members," said John Lohmeyer, chair of the T10 Technical Committee and Principal Engineer, LSI Logic. "Rewarding because the draft standard was very well written and challenging because of our compressed development schedule. T10 feels a great sense of accomplishment in what we have done in a very short time."

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.

###

For additional information on INCITS, please visit the website at http://www.incits.org

For more information on the T10 committee, please visit http://www.t10.org

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.