SAS Demonstrations Highlight Dual-port SAS Drive Reliability/Scalability and SAS/SATA Drives in a SAS System Showing Performance/Flexibility
San Francisco, Sept. 7, 2004 – The SCSI Trade Association (STA), a member-run industry consortium established to support and promote SCSI technology, announced today that it is showing two live SAS demonstrations in the STA booth (booth number 939, Moscone Convention Center), at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, September 7-9.
The SAS Reliability and Scalability demonstration shows two 8-port Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) controllers connected to an external storage enclosure populated with SAS drives. It showcases SAS reliability and scalability with dual-port disk drives, redundant cables and controllers, and cascaded storage using SAS expanders.
SAS disk drive mechanics are designed and configured with redundant connections that allow RAID storage systems to continue to function in spite of drive failure, controller failure, or single port/cable failure in order to withstand the rigors of mission-critical enterprise environments. The demonstration operates at the full bandwidth SAS specification of 3Gbps.
The SAS Performance and Flexibility demonstration, also running at 3Gbps, consists of two enclosures, each with interoperating SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives. The demonstration measures the throughput of each connection by running IOMeter. SAS technology delivers scalable performance, capacity and flexibility to support a wide range of enterprise storage requirements. SAS drives deliver the performance and reliability needed for transactional data while SATA drives deliver the greatest capacity for non-mission critical reference data.
Harry Mason, President of the STA Board of Directors and Director of Industry Marketing at LSI Logic stated, “The IDF demonstrations this week are intended to show that Serial Attached SCSI is ready for prime time. The wide array of SAS building block components in the demonstrations has undergone rigorous industry testing and is being readied for volume deployment within the enterprise. We expect production shipments of certain components to begin in fourth quarter, 2004, with volume ramps occurring early in 2005.”
Visitors to the STA booth will be able to sign up for Serial Storage Wire, the SAS online newsletter published by STA (sign-up is also available on the STA web site). They will be able to pick up new SAS collateral, including a SAS white paper and end-user’s brochure.
STA member companies participating in the IDF booth include Adaptec, CATC, Hitachi GST, HP, PMC-Sierra, Fujitsu CPA and LSI Logic.
Two SAS interoperability plugfests have been held year-to-date, with another scheduled for the first week of November. The plugfests are critical to the process of preparing SAS products for market, as they give customers confidence that the production products shipping will operate perfectly.
For further information, contact:
Editorial Contact:
Lea Schwartz
pointpr@qwest.net
970-225-3753