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With the emergence of PCIe 3.0 systems, the need for a higher performance storage interface is critical. 12Gb/s SAS storage architectures offers the best bandwidth utilization of the PCIe 3.0 host bus. The PCIe 3.0 bus increases the maximum available bandwidth to 8,000MB/s, while 6Gb/s SAS is limited to 4,800MB/s, not using almost half of the potential throughput. The chart in Figure 1 shows that a 100% gain in storage throughput can be achieved by moving to a PCIe 3.0 system and using 12Gb/s SAS as the storage connection. 12Gb/s SAS actually provides more bandwidth than PCIe 3.0, providing a path to future performance enhancements. 12Gb/s SAS not only unlocks the bandwidth capabilities of PCIe 3.0, but also opens the door for extremely high small block performance well in the excess of 1M IOP/s.

By: Jay Neer, , Molex, SCSI Trade Association Board Member-at-Large

A number of new multi-sourced, intermateable connector products are queued up for the release of the INCITS T10 12Gb/s SAS standard. These new storage connectivity components enable end-to-end integration of the architectural and protocol enhancements for 12Gb/s SAS. Systems providers and integrators will have solutions that are twice as dense, twice as fast, more versatile, and extend farther than previous generations of SAS. Figure 1 provides a high level view of the new, end-to- end connectivity solutions involved.

By Daniel D. Reno, Director, Technical Marketing, Western Digital and Member-at-Large, STA Board of Director

Enterprise customers demand the highest levels of quality and reliability for the systems they deploy. To deliver these robust solutions, industry leaders rely on the most advanced technologies available as a foundation of their product solutions. Within these products, the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface has become a critical component for building the 'Unstoppable Datacenter'.

By: Bret Gibbs, Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company, SCSI Trade Association

SCSI Express is an emerging storage interface that runs Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) commands over a PCI Express (PCIe) link. It combines the enterprise-proven SCSI command set with the low latency of PCIe to create a powerful enterprise-class interface for the high-performance capabilities of SSD/flash storage.

Author: Jeremiah Tussey, PMC Senior Applications Engineer

Today's challenging datacenter environments demand flexible switching and connection capabilities for storage scalability. SAS storage architectures allow for extensible configurations by providing incremental connectivity solutions: passive copper cables, active copper cables, and active optical cables. The fundamental basis driving these solutions is the necessity for a variety of cabling options; depending on a SAS topology's needs for tiered interconnectivity, segregation, and failover capabilities. Figure 1 shows these different available options and how they might be used.

(by: Cameron Brett, former Manager, Alliances Marketing at PMC-Sierra, Inc.)

Tiered storage can have many meanings. It can mean the time-based movement of data from primary storage to an archive, as in hierarchical storage management (HSM). It can be interpreted as ensuring mission critical data is stored on the most protected storage volumes while less important data is stored on less protected storage. Today, it is commonly referred to as the caching or movement of data to flash-based storage for the fastest access of the most frequently accessed data so systems can perform at their optimal capability.

ATTEN-SHUN Serial Storage Wire Readers!

Whether you use Siri, Outlook, Google, or an old fashioned day timer, you'll want to mark your calendars now for Wednesday May 9, 2012. It's a special day for STA and one you simply can't miss. From 6:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. that evening, STA will be opening the doors to its free Technology Showcase at the Santa Clara Hyatt featuring a packed-full agenda of SAS storage products and technologies demonstrations, special guest speakers, high-level networking, a hosted reception and more beastly surprises.

Increase media access and server scalability while reducing latency and TCO

The growth in Cloud computing is driving new innovations to enable a wider array of supported applications. Email server, interactive databases and transaction processing applications require increased media access, application failover, reduced latency, and greater scalability. Technology is poised to deliver on these requirements while maintaining focus on total cost of ownership (TCO). Two areas of technology that are addressing the latency and cost requirements of the Cloud are virtualization and High-availability clustering.

The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) has about two dozen Technical Committees that develop standards for both ANSI and ISO/IEC. T10 (http://www.t10.org/), the Technical Committee for SCSI storage interfaces is the largest of these Technical Committees with a membership of nearly 80 organizations. All modern storage devices comply with one or more standards developed in T10.

It's nothing new that technology changes rapidly. Enterprise storage is no exception. Keeping data moving at faster speeds and having the ability to properly manage that data has never been more critical to having businesses run smoothly. Applications such as database, commerce and transaction, web serving and streaming use massive amounts of data and storage requirements continue to increase. New technologies need to be integrated into these storage architectures to reduce potential bottlenecks.