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Author: Mike Micheletti, Product Manager
LeCroy Corporation

Now that component vendors Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) are shipping in volume, storage integrators are rolling up their sleeves to begin evaluating this powerful new storage interface. Anxious to harness superior performance, these SAS developers are testing hosts, devices and storage subsystems for compatibility and reliability. Early adopters are impressed to see their legacy SCSI applications running on top of SAS storage volumes without modification. But is SAS robust enough to replace parallel SCSI in mission critical applications?

Author: Rachelle Trent, SAS Product Marketing Manager

PMC-Sierra's maxSAS™ storage family includes Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expanders, SAS/Serial ATA (SATA) retimers, SAS/SATA multiplexers and enclosure management processors. To accelerate OEM and ODM development cycles for tiered storage disk arrays, PMC-Sierra provides complete reference systems for its entire maxSAS product line.

The latest editions to PMC's maxSAS family include SAS expander switches with zoning support and intelligent SATA active/active multiplexers. A complete SAS/SATA storage system solution can be realized by using PMC's SAS expander switches combined with the intelligent active/active SATA multiplexers.

Author: Charlie Kraus, Director, HBA Business Unit
LSI Logic

After enjoying an amazing run of longevity and evolution, parallel SCSI is finally seeing the end of its reign, to be replaced by Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). SAS builds on, and improves on, the parallel SCSI foundation and succeeds Ultra320 SCSI on the industry roadmap:

Table 1: Serial Attached SCSI Roadmap.
Source: SCSI Trade Association, 2005

Author: Tonya Comer, Product Marketing Manager, Industry Standard Servers,
HP

IT managers have traditionally had scant flexibility when choosing a data center storage solution. Their options were limited to separate systems based on parallel Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) or Fibre Channel disk interfaces. These storage options constrained the IT manager's ability to deploy and redeploy core technologies, thereby often adding a significant cost and management burden to the overall enterprise. With the advent of serial I/O architectures, key solution providers, such as HP, can now provide one system or storage solution that will meet the requirements for a broad range of storage applications. This will enable IT managers to standardize on a single server or storage platform, dramatically reducing the complexities of managing storage applications in today's data center.

HP's Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) solutions are the next generation in storage technology, offering better performance, flexibility and scalability. HP has been instrumental in driving the direction of SAS and SATA technologies within the industry. HP designs solutions that are the most advanced and most thoroughly tested, in order to provide the best customer experience possible. HP has ensured that key contributors are unified in the industry direction and development of this monumental technology.

The direction that HP is taking this technology is based on feedback from users—overwhelmingly, the customer has requested a transition from the existing SCSI platforms to the small form factor (SFF) SAS platform. Product development addresses customer pains relating to heat management of newer generation processors by creating drives that draw half the power of their predecessors. It also addresses concerns around physical space constraints, as well as general IT issues such as performance, metrics and density.

Author: Linus Wong, Director, Strategic Marketing
Adaptec

Adaptec offers solutions that integrate a broad range of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products, from RAID controllers and host bus adapters to internal storage enclosures and external arrays. These solutions are built on a platform that enables products to be easily mixed and matched to meet specific storage needs and are also integrated into existing storage environments without retrofitting.

Authors: Franco Castaldini, Sr. Product Marketing Mgr. and Kent Bransford, Sr. Technical Editor,
Seagate Technology

As the pace of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) product introductions continues to accelerate, IT managers enjoy an increasingly broad range of SAS storage solutions from which to choose. While the inherent performance advantages of SAS disk drives are certainly compelling, savvy IT professionals are even more excited about the revolutionary role SAS will play in the larger context of storage infrastructures.

Storage is entering a new era of cost-effectiveness and efficiency, driven by the growing movement towards specialized storage solutions. The value proposition of such storage is straightforward: Optimize price/performance by matching the storage device to the specific characteristics of the data and/or storage environment. SAS is a fundamental enabling technology in this specialization revolution, seamlessly integrating multiple types of storage devices in one enterprise-class infrastructure.

Author: Sam Barnett, Product Line Manager for Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA,
Vitesse Semiconductor

The NexSAS™ family of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products from Vitesse offers server and storage enclosure OEMs, ODMs, and contract manufacturers (CMs) the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of solutions for the emerging SAS market. Comprised of edge expanders, fanout expanders, RAID-on-CHIP offerings, intelligent mux/de-mux devices, discrete enclosure management/SAS backplane controllers, and rate-agile signal conditioners, the NexSAS™ line delivers on the promise of high performance storage solutions for SMB (small/medium business) as well as enterprise systems.

The Vitesse NexSAS™ product family is divided into four functional areas: expander technology, RAID-on-CHIP, SAS/SATA Support devices, and Enclosure Management. This article explores the NexSAS™ expander and RAID-on-CHIP technology in detail.

Author: James Pascoe, Corporate Communications Manager,
Hitachi

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a next-generation serial interface designed to extend the capabilities of today's parallel SCSI drives and provide users with improved performance, system design flexibility and product reliability. SAS hard drives are expected to benefit enterprise server and storage customers who require extremely fast and reliable hard disk drives.

SAS supports data transfer rates of up to 3.0 Gb/s and full duplex, point-to-point connections so that each drive has a dedicated connection to the host. While parallel SCSI limited users to 15 drives per controller, SAS architecture supports up to 16,384 connections for much greater scalability. The enterprise interface has been designed for use in storage area networking, file sharing, workgroup and scientific/engineering environments.