SCSI Trade Association Heralds Release of Next-Generation SAS

By Greg McNevin

September 29, 2008: According to the SCSI Trade Association (STA), the next generation of SAS storage interfaces is ready for prime time, promising 6GB/s and a challenge to increasing interest in solid state disks.

Following five-years of research and development, the association says that the new generation of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is set to hit the enterprise storage market, and will take the name “6Gb/s SAS” rather than the name of the standard specification, SAS–2, designated by T10 Technical Committee, which is under the direction of the InterNational Committee for Information and Technology Standards (INCITS).

The difference between the two, is SAS–2 describes the features and capabilities for 6Gb/s SAS products, while the STA defines 6Gb/s SAS as a required set of features.

“This new generation of SAS provides investment protection by preserving existing SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) installations, while propelling the market ahead with important new capabilities,” said Harry Mason, Director of Industry Marketing, LSI, and President of STA.

“6Gb/s SAS extends SAS architecture deeper into enterprise storage by doubling transfer rates, improving the scalability of the topology and increasing overall Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) attributes.

“These capabilities support the challenges of clustering, scale-out and storage tiering, including the growing interest in solid state drives.”

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