If you're a regular reader of STA's Serial Storage Wire, you know that there's a transition taking place in the storage industry from FC-AL to Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) storage architectures and disk drives... NetApp is well into this technology transition, where SAS-connected disk shelves now account for a majority of storage shipped with new NetApp® systems.
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Contributed article to InterConnection World by Jay Neer, Molex
The initial release for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) connectors and cables was a bit different from the typical release of a new I/O standard. The SCSI Trade Association (STA) was committed to enabling Serial ATA (SATA) connectivity with SAS, so close coordination was required between the two standards organizations to achieve this goal. The idea was to create one-way interconnectivity to permit SATA hard-disk drives (HDDs) to plug into SAS backplanes, while preventing the dual-port SAS HDDs from plugging into SATA backplanes.
