STA announces completion of serial attached SCSI specification

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, May 26, 2003

The SCSI Trade Association (STA), a member-run industry consortium established to support and promote SCSI technology, announced recently that the Serial Attached SCSI 1.0 specification was forwarded on May 8 by the T10 Committee to the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). The specification will be circulated by INCITS for public review and comment followed by a letter ballot, both key milestones on the path to becoming an international standard.

The Serial Attached SCSI specification defines a device-level enterprise storage interface incorporating SCSI backward compatibility, serial point-to-point interconnections, dual porting, increased addressability and the ability to scale to small form factors. Its physical layer has been engineered to be compatible with Serial ATA's physical layer, giving users the choice of populating their systems with Serial Attached SCSI or Serial ATA hard disk drives, or a combination of both. Compatibility of the two specifications will be assured, as T10 had the advantage of working with selected parts of the Serial ATA 2.0 specification provided by the Serial ATA II Working Group.

Harry Mason, President of the STA Board of Directors and Director of Industry Marketing at LSI Logic, stated, "The Serial Attached SCSI specification continues its predicted development and review schedule. OEMs are working hard on their product designs and early demos. The industry is starting to see Serial Attached SCSI demos and by fall there will be more as companies prepare their products for introduction in 2004."

"T10 forwarded Serial Attached SCSI to INCITS at our May 8, 2003 meeting, where it will go through a 45-day public review period," said John Lohmeyer, Chair of the T10 Technical Committee and Principal Engineer, LSI Logic. "If there are no comments, INCITS will issue a letter ballot and barring comments, it then goes to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). "I view Serial Attached SCSI as technically stable and we are on track for ANSI publication of the standard by late summer," he added.

Dave Reinsel, Hard Disk Drive Research Manager at IDC, said, "When Serial Attached SCSI enters the enterprise storage market in 2004, it should carry the robust reliability for which SCSI is well known. Its expected compatibility with Serial ATA will be a market advantage for current, as well as new SCSI users, who want the flexibility of both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA hard drives in a Serial Attached SCSI system."

STA will schedule 'plugfests' (test labs) in 1Q 2004, in cooperation with the University of New Hampshire, to provide STA members with the opportunity to test all newly developed Serial Attached SCSI products for compatibility with Serial ATA and for interoperability. The broad array of products to enter the market in 2004 will come from STA member companies which produce controllers, host bus adaptors, hard disk drives, cables, connectors, systems, software, expanders, converters, switches, I/O and test and verification systems. Enterprise users will be able to confidently continue investing in SCSI technology that delivers a scalable feature set and robust reliability.