Third Serial Attached SCSI Plugfest Tests Products For Market In 4th Quarter and Early 2005

SAN FRANCISCO and DURHAM, NH – Oct. 19, 2004 – The SCSI Trade Association (STA), a member-run industry consortium established to support and promote SCSI technology and the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) announced today that the third Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) plugfest of the year will be held from November 1-5 at UNH-IOL. The UNH-IOL laboratory is hosting the event in its 32,000 square foot Durham facility. An open invitation to attend is extended to any company interested in advancing SAS technology and bringing SAS products to market.

The purpose of the plugfest is to ensure that SAS products manufactured by different companies will interoperate in SAS systems. While some of the companies that attend the plugfest will be testing complete systems, most will be testing components; such as controllers, boards, hard disk drives, cables and connectors that will be sold to OEMs, system integrators and value-added resellers who are building and selling tomorrow’s data storage equipment. SAS storage systems will provide greater reliability, flexibility, scalability and performance than storage systems in use today.

Special sessions will be scheduled for SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) interoperability testing. SAS was designed and developed to support operation of both types of drives in a single SAS infrastructure. It will contribute to enterprise storage flexibility and performance, as it will give users many more options in configuring cost-effective enterprise storage centers that accommodate multiple storage requirements, including online, reference, regulatory and content data.

Harry Mason, President of the STA Board of Directors and Director of Industry Marketing, LSI Logic, stated, “SAS has made remarkable progress this year. The two earlier plugfests demonstrated that the technology is sound and on track for market entry per the schedule we established more than two years ago. With the third plugfest just around the corner, attending STA members and non-member vendors will be testing production versions of their offerings before broad market deployment.”

“We designed our PHY layer test suites to put SAS through serious paces,” said David Woolf, UNH-IOL SAS Consortium engineer. “We’ll be testing SAS in a rigorous ‘worst case scenario’ environment that we hope will result in highly refined implementations and a stronger device pool.”

STA members have recently demonstrated live SAS systems at shows, including HP World and Intel Developer Forum. The demonstrations provided positive feedback on market readiness that SAS components and products have achieved.

About SCSI Trade Association
The SCSI Trade Association was established in 1995 to provide a focal point for members to communicate the benefits of SCSI to the industry. STA promotes the understanding and use of SCSI technology and influences the evolution of SCSI standards to meet future industry needs. The Association has an eight-member Board of Directors, which oversees the Marketing Communications and Technology Committees and all STA activities. 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.

About the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory
Established in 1988, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) is a non-profit organization that offers comprehensive interoperability and conformance-based testing through 19 technology-based groups, called consortiums. Test solutions created at the UNH-IOL offer a set of methods to increase interoperability through protocol operations, signaling, point-to-point and multi-system scenarios. For more information, visit the UNH-IOL website at: www.iol.unh.edu.

The UNH-IOL also runs SAS and related Serial ATA (SATA) Consortia, separate associations of companies building new products and interested in testing them on an ongoing basis.

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NOTE TO THE PRESS:
Following, and on the next page, are quotes from STA members that are attending the November plugfest.

Adaptec
“Industry-wide interoperability is key to driving market adoption of Serial Attached SCSI, and the STA/UNH plugfest will help storage vendors remain on track to launch compatible products later this year,” said Linus Wong, strategic marketing director at Adaptec. “Adaptec is pleased to support the SAS plugfests with products that deliver new levels of configuration flexibility, performance, data protection and scalability for direct-attached and network storage.”

Amphenol
“Amphenol has gained a greater understanding of the needs of our customers and application of the technologies that we are supporting as a result of the open exchange of information that occurs at the plugfest events,” said John Majernik, High Speed Product Manager, Amphenol Interconnect Products. “Participation promotes a free exchange of questions and answers among the participants. We all benefit from the events and so will the end users of the technologies that we are defining and refining.”

CATC
“We are encouraged by the industry’s continued support of the SAS plugfest. The aggressive time table outlined for these events definitely underscores the importance of testing interoperability between devices from different vendors,” said Michael Micheletti, Senior Product Manager, Storage Products. “CATC is looking forward to supporting plugfest #3 with an expanded test suite for SAS compliance verification that should further increase vendor confidence in the market-readiness for products using Serial Attached SCSI protocol.”

EqualLogic
“SAS technology is an excellent complement to EqualLogic’s current product offerings, and we are committed to ensuring full interoperability with both SAS and SATA drives,” said Brian Nadeau, director of storage engineering for EqualLogic. “We are making a strategic investment in SAS to offer our customers access to new features and additional choices to meet a wide range of performance and availability requirements.”

Finisar
“Finisar is pleased to be a part of the SAS plugfest hosted by the IOL,” said Finisar Vice President of Marketing, Brian Staff. “Our company has been delivering high quality analyzer products for the storage market since 1996. Recently, we acquired the assets of Data Transit to better support the needs of our high- speed serial storage protocol customers. The combination of our two forces has resulted in the best of breed for products in the SAS market place.”

Fujitsu CPA
“SAS plugfests provide Fujitsu and the industry with an important interoperability platform to ensure that systems builders, OEMs and customers quickly realize the benefit of serial storage technology,” said Joel Hagberg, vice president, marketing and business development, Fujitsu Computer Products of America. “Fujitsu announced its leadership in serial storage in December 2004 by delivering the industry’s first small form factor Serial Attached SCSI prototype enterprise hard disk drive along with our 2.5″ mobile SATA drive. Fujitsu plans to remain a leader in advancing these technologies as the industry continues to shift to serial interfaces and smaller form factors.”

HP
“The storage industry is making significant progress in the SAS market,” said Javier Izquierdo, director of Server Storage, HP. “The rapid progress is due in large part to the commitment to interoperability by STA member companies. One of the most effective tools in driving that interoperability has been industry plugfests, such as the one coming up in early November. The upcoming plugfest will allow HP, and other participants, to test interoperability with the most mature set of SAS products available.”

I-TECH
“As a test vendor, I-TECH considers the SAS plugfests a valuable part of the product development and checkout process for our SAS test solutions. It’s a great opportunity for our engineers to interact with our customers and evaluate their needs in real-time test situations. The feedback we get from our customers helps us design a more robust product,” said Tom Prohofsky, I-TECH Director of Product Development.

Maxtor
“As a leader in SAS technology development, Maxtor supports interoperability testing to accelerate the deployment of SAS and SATA drives into a variety of applications,” said Marty Czekalski, interface architecture initiatives manager at Maxtor and vice president of the SCSI Trade Association. “Because the SAS architecture is compatible with both SAS and SATA drives, it provides flexibility and scalability in one enclosure that can serve as a universal building block for constructing a data center’s storage infrastructure.”

PMC-Sierra
“Industry-wide interoperability is a key component of PMC-Sierra’s maxSAS product family,” said Travis Karr, Director of Marketing and Applications, Enterprise Storage Division at PMC-Sierra. “Proving interoperability with multi-vendor SAS components provides our customers with a robust solution and a distinct time-to-market advantage.”

Seagate
“Seagate has helped drive SAS technology forward with other industry leaders to ensure a smooth transition from SCSI to SAS,” said Bill Schilling, Director of Global Product Marketing at Seagate. “Being a customer-focused company, Seagate has pioneered new and innovative SAS products that include our Savvio 2.5-inch enterprise drive as well as our Cheetah 15K.4. These drives, when coupled with the new levels of performance and scalability benefits of SAS, will ultimately fulfill the needs of IT professionals everywhere.”

Vitesse
“Participation in the SAS Plugfest has provided great exposure for the Vitesse NexSAS Expander product line. The interoperability environment offered at the plugfest significantly accelerated our time to market with SAS products, that are fully functional to the SAS standard, by working with other vendor’s HBA and HDD components to benefit the end customer,” said Bob Cutter, vice president and general manager of the Storage Products Division at Vitesse.