The industry is gearing up for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), a new, faster version of SCSI designed to meet the demands of enterprise IT for the coming decade. The SAS interface supports both SAS disk drives for mission critical applications and Serial ATA (SATA) drives for low-cost bulk storage of reference data, giving IT managers greater price and performance flexibility in their storage strategies. As a result, managers can now make storage decisions that better align with business requirements, balancing their storage investment between compatible technologies and assigning storage devices to data based on the information’s business value, providing a more cost-effective solution. (By Enterprise Management Associates, November 2004)