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Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), the follow-on to parallel SCSI, is designed for high performance enterprise requirements and offers both the benefits of backward compatibility with SCSI and interoperability with Serial ATA (SATA), bringing enterprises a flexibility and cost savings previously not possible for traditional storage environments. SAS provides significant benefits to external storage subsystems and offers users "one-stop-shopping" to satisfy their requirements for the following three main data types.

An external subsystem with a SAS midplane will support both high performance, reliable SAS drives ideal for transaction data, and cost-effective, high capacity SATA drives ideal for reference and throughput data, thus providing customers with one platform instead of two to support both drive types and satisfy all three application segments. SAS based external storage arrays provide benefits in four areas: performance, availability, flexibility, scalability and cost of ownership.

Because of its trusted reliability and stable feature set, the SCSI protocol has been accepted by the market for a remarkable twenty years. Introduced three years ago, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) leverages this continuing evolution of SCSI with new levels of scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for connectivity, data transport, and data storage.

The first SAS prototypes were announced in 2003 and were a major step to achieving mass market availability. Those prototypes allowed development of the first generation of technologies and products that will bring the benefits of SAS into the enterprise. These products have now been developed and tested, and a wide variety of integrated solutions have been demonstrated.

Interoperability testing was a key component of SAS, because it increases the architecture's flexibility by supporting both SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives and components. Interoperability allows one vendor's SAS products to be compatible with another's, and it also ensures products developed today will work with all existing and next-generation SATA products.

Interoperability testing was conducted throughout 2004, and the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory, successfully demonstrated all the required levels of interoperability in a variety of SAS products and configurations.

The same companies that pioneered SCSI are investing in its evolution to maintain its high reliability standards while meeting the market's evolving technology and functionality requirements. Industry support comes from all of the major disk drive vendors, host adapter suppliers, chipset manufacturers, large computer makers, and many other suppliers.

A wide variety of recent product and solution announcements have been made, with some product currently shipping. Others are expected to ship in early 2005 to make the long promise of SAS a reality. SAS subsystems are expected to ship in the first quarter of calendar 2005, and will coincide with the availability of SAS disk drives and SAS host bus adapters. Volume shipments will commence in the second quarter.

Higher Performance

SAS has received this kind of market attention due to several performance benefits. For example, a SAS connection can support four SAS wide lanes or 4 x 300 MB/s per connection.

A SAS connection on a JBOD system can support a theoretical maximum of 1,200 MB/s. SAS is also used as a high performance, yet cost-effective expansion port to daisy chain to another SAS subsystem.

Summary

Serial Attached SCSI will offer new levels of performance, availability and customer choice by supporting both enterprise-class Serial Attached SCSI drives and Serial ATA drives for cost-sensitive applications. OEMs and IT managers will have the flexibility to configure storage subsystems with either drive technology, or both, enabling high-performance and low-cost storage in the same subsystem thus maximizing customers' return on investment and providing flexibility for future growth.