STA Proclaims SAS HDD Usage Rate is a Leading Indicator of Explosive Future Demand

SAN FRANCISCO, June 25, 2007 — The SCSI Trade Association (STA), a member-run industry association established to support and promote SCSI technology, announced that 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) will replace Ultra320 SCSI as the hard disk drive (HDD) interface of choice in standard high volume servers during 2007. A recent Gartner research report, Dataquest Alert: Serial Attached SCSI to Dominate in 2007, by John Monroe, Research VP, Gartner Dataquest, covers the multi-user SAS HDD market, citing 4.15 million, or 11.2 percent, of all multi-user HDDs utilized in 2006 were SAS drives. When combined with 2005 SAS HDD shipments (the first year SAS HDDs shipped in any significant volume, according to Gartner), the installed base of SAS HDDs at the end of 2006 totaled nearly 4.5 million units. The Report predicts that almost 12 million SAS HDDs will ship this year.

The 3Gb/s SAS growth rate is forecast to continue well into 2008. Beginning in late 2008, Gartner Dataquest indicates that 6Gb/s SAS will support and sustain SAS market penetration and increase its dominance in the multi-user drive markets. 6Gb/s SAS will ultimately achieve a 210 percent compound annual growth rate between 2007 and 2011.

“The server market has successfully transitioned from parallel SCSI, which dominated the market for over 20 years, to 3Gb/s SAS,” stated Harry Mason, Director, Industry Marketing, LSI, and President of STA. “We anticipated the dramatic growth in SAS shipments witnessed in the fourth quarter of 2006, and expect volumes to significantly increase throughout 2007. STA members are shipping more small form factor (SFF) HDDs to enterprise environments. Emerging SAS designs for blade servers, as well as networked storage solutions, promise to fuel new growth as SAS makes its way deeper into the enterprise. STA believes SFF drives will become the dominant form factor in multi-user applications, due to the concern over power usage costs of 3.5-inch drives.”

SAS generational upgrades can be easily implemented because of the retention of the parallel SCSI data protocols when it was developed. SAS also competes cost-effectively with either high-end or low-end drives in the multi-user storage spectrum, thereby narrowing users’ selection to easy-to-use, cost-effective and highly scalable SAS in the data center.

STA Member HDD Manufacturer Comments:

Fujitsu CPA
“Fujitsu committed early to SAS before there was widespread enterprise appreciation for its performance and scalability benefits, and it’s exciting to see such strong market adoption and forecast for continued growth,” said Joel Hagberg, vice president, marketing and business development, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. “We continue to see strong demand for both 3.5″ and small form factor 2.5″ SAS HDDs and look forward to working with our partners and customers to deliver exciting new enterprise applications.”

Hitachi GST
“We see clear benefits in a transition to SAS for our customers in terms of scalability and greater performance, and have supported the interface in our enterprise-class hard drives since 2005,” said Doug Pickford, director, market and product strategy, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “2007 will mark a turning point in SAS adoption and Hitachi is well positioned to help drive the transition with the delivery of our new Ultrastar enterprise 10K small form factor and 15K 3.5″ hard drives.”

HP
“HP offers a complete line of SFF SAS drives across our entire portfolio of x86 and c-Class BladeSystem servers and storage,” said Ron Noblett, vice president, Shared Technology, Industry Standard Servers and BladeSystem Division, HP. “In line with the industry trend, HP’s customers are clearly seeing the performance, reliability, hard drive power savings, and other efficiency advantages SFF SAS drives offer and the adoption rates have surpassed our most aggressive expectations.”

Seagate
“Enterprise demand for SAS solutions has gained momentum, with solutions such as Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.5 and Savvio small form factor enterprise drive families leading the charge,” said Sherman Black, Seagate senior vice president and general manage, Enterprise Compute Business. “SAS is a significant growth area for our business and Seagate remains committed to delivering solutions that will continue to meet the needs of the enterprise.”

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. Today, STA promotes the understanding and use of Serial Attached SCSI technology and influences the evolution of SAS standards to meet future industry needs. The Association has a nine-member Board of Directors that oversees the Marketing Communications and Technology Committees and all STA activities. To subscribe to Serial Storage Wire, STA’s free Serial Attached SCSI newsletter, please visit: www.serialstoragewire.com. For more information, please visit the STA web site at http://www.scsita.org, send an email to info@scsita.org or call the STA office at 415-561-6273.

1. Gartner, Inc., “Dataquest Alert: Serial Attached SCSI to Dominate in 2007”, by John Monroe, April 9, 2007.

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