STA

By Paul Vogt, Director of Product Marketing,
Adaptec

The flexibility of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) allows it to be used as a universal connectivity standard for a wide range of business needs. In addition to its role as a replacement for parallel SCSI, SAS now offers the ability to reduce the cost of servers and storage networks, to create tiered solutions that weren't possible before, and to provide investment protection for SATA installations. While SAS performance and scalability generate a majority of the media attention, it could be the flexibility that SAS brings to storage subsystems that creates the most value for your business.

SAS as a parallel SCSI replacement
SAS maintains support for the proven SCSI command set while offering much better performance, scalability, and availability. Stability and reliability have made parallel SCSI the standard in storage connectivity for twenty five years. SAS offers compatibility with this command set while overcoming the physical limitations of parallel SCSI. Now with SAS, it is possible to take advantage of dual-port drives, redundant connections, failover support and scalability up to 128 attached devices and over 16,000 addressable devices. Performance at 3Gb/s per port can be aggregated into wide-port connection bandwidth.

Author: Kent Bransford, Senior Technical Editor,
Seagate Technology

As capacity demands and energy costs continue to escalate, the need for greater data center efficiency has become increasingly urgent. A recent study by research company, Robert Frances Group, found that 41 percent of IT executives surveyed at Fortune 500 companies view power and cooling as major concerns. That same study revealed that while Fortune 1000 companies averaged 138TB of storage in 2004, by 2006 that figure had mushroomed to 600TB.

Recognizing the fundamental role that hard disk drive (HDD) storage plays in shaping the data center footprint, power and cooling profiles, Seagate has specifically designed its Savvio and Cheetah enterprise-class SAS drives to deliver maximum performance while enabling systems with reduced space and energy requirements.

Author: David So, Strategic Marketing Manager,
LSI Logic

The storage industry has gradually been introduced to the newest storage interface, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), over the past few years. In that time, numerous companies have announced a wide array of SAS infrastructure components as well as SAS-based servers and external storage systems. Among those companies are SCSI Trade Association (STA) members LSI Logic, Adaptec, Fujitsu, Hitachi GST, HP, Intel, Molex, PMC-Sierra, Seagate, and Vitesse, with products including ICs, host bus adapters (HBAs), cables, 2.5" and 3.5" disk drives and drive enclosures.

STA has gone to great lengths to educate the public on the features and benefits of SAS and why this technology will be critical to the future of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) environments, and potentially Storage Area Networks (SANs). STA has sponsored a series of plugfests at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab to ensure compatibility of different vendors' SAS products with one another, thereby easing the adoption and integration of SAS into the marketplace.

Author: Rachelle Trent, SAS Product Marketing Manager,
PMC-Sierra

PMC-Sierra's maxSAS™ storage family includes Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expander switches with zoning support and intelligent Serial ATA (SATA) active/active multiplexers. It also includes SAS/SATA retimers and enclosure management processors supporting the 3.0 Gb/s SAS specification. To accelerate OEM and ODM development cycles for tiered-storage disk arrays, PMC-Sierra provides complete reference systems for its entire maxSAS product line.

PMC's maxSAS products are all production released and shipping in volume, as follows:

PM8398 SXP 36x3GSec: 36-Port SAS Expander with Zoning
PM8399 SXP 24x3GSec: 24-Port SAS Expander with Zoning

Author: Karin Gilles, Corporate Communications,
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Data center workloads have increased exponentially in recent years, requiring IT managers to find new ways of scaling their enterprise storage resources so that they are both highly reliable and cost effective. With the introduction of complementary serial interface technologies, IT managers now have the flexibility to deploy either high-performance Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives or cost-effective Serial ATA (SATA) drives (or both) in a SAS environment.

This approach to tiered storage allows IT managers to control costs and pair the less frequently used data with lower cost-per-gigabyte hard drives, while freeing high-performance SAS drive resources for mission-critical applications.