Features - Storage Innovations:

SEAGATE, LSI DEMO 2.5-INCH SAS DUAL-PORT DRIVES AT 3Gb/s

Seagate Technology and LSI Logic announced they will showcase the industry's first public demonstration of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) dual-port and 3Gb/s transfer rates using the world's first 2.5-inch enterprise disc drives and LSI Logic SAS1064 controller ICs. Booth demonstrations at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco beginning Feb. 17 underscore the rapid advancement of SAS product development and Seagate and LSI Logic's leadership in developing the market for this evolutionary storage technology that boasts the most flexible enterprise I/O with its unrivaled blend of performance, scalability and compatibility, enabling IT professionals to consolidate enterprise storage solutions and thus significantly lower infrastructure costs.

The demonstration highlights two key areas of Seagate's leadership in disc drive technology and innovation: interface technology and the new 2.5-inch platform for enterprise disc drives. Seagate plans to deliver its first SAS products in Fall 2004, extending its broad product line and building on the company's history of market leadership with new interfaces including SCSI, Fibre Channel and Serial ATA. LSI Logic has announced plans to provide the industry's most comprehensive family of SAS controllers, expanders, host bus adapters and ROMB and RAID storage adapter solutions.

"As data storage needs continue to grow in the enterprise, Seagate's Serial Attached SCSI solutions will deliver the necessary performance and scalability IT managers require when running high-transaction applications on business-critical systems," said Jeff Loebbaka, Seagate vice president of global marketing. "The technology leadership demonstrated today is largely a result of our commitment to R & D. When the leader in SCSI disc drives wanted to design a new interface, Seagate turned to LSI Logic and gained a time-tomarket advantage by deploying LSI Logic's Rapid Chip platform ASIC that will ultimately benefit our OEM customers."

Seagate will feature systems in booth #402 consisting of LSI Logic SAS host bus adapters transmitting data at 3Gb/s with Seagate's 2.5-inch enterprise disc drive. With dual-port capability, the demonstration showcases a key differentiator between SAS and SATA drives. In enterprise environments that demand reliability, high-availability, and performance, dual port is an essential feature to ensure a stable system environment as well as to enable added performance for Direct Attached Storage subsystems. The cooperation between Seagate and LSI Logic on SAS development demonstrates the companies' commitment to end-to-end interoperability.

LSI Logic will host a companion demonstration in IDF booth #716 where the companies will feature multiple SAS and Serial ATA disc drives, and SAS protocol compliance. In addition, Seagate and LSI Logic are supporting a SAS display in the SCSI Trade Association booth #647 illustrating the benefits of building SAS enclosures for greater flexibility in choosing the right drive for the application.

"We're able to link all our design components -- common driver architecture, process and ASIC technology, libraries and memories. The result is outstanding Serial Attached SCSI silicon and a RapidChip platform ASIC that cuts time, saves cost and maintains reliability," said John D'Errico, executive vice president for storage and communications at LSI Logic. "By being first to bring a small form factor SAS drive to market, Seagate has again proven itself a market leader and at the forefront of SAS product development."

Serial Attached SCSI is the next step for the industry's storage I/O standard interface. SAS technology extends SCSI interface solutions beyond Ultra320 to the next-generation Direct Attach Storage (DAS) server and workstation markets while retaining device-level backward compatibility. And because the SAS physical layer is compatible with SATA, users will have the choice of populating SAS systems with either SATA or SAS hard disc drives, or a combination of both. Boasting features that liberate SCSI from its parallel predecessor, SAS delivers new levels of breakthrough speed and connectivity while retaining the functionality and reliability.

With enterprise storage requirements escalating and becoming more complex, factors such as data center consolidation, security, scalability and accessibility are more critical than ever. Enterprise data centers must be online all the time, fulfill requests from numerous users simultaneously, allow for constant growth and expansion and be maintained while in operation. Serial Attached SCSI meets all these demands while providing the highest performance at optimal capacity points.

URLs to extend your product knowledge:

• Seagate SAS solutions specials.seagate.com/sas
• LSI Logic SAS solutions lsilogic.com/sas
• LSI Logic RapidChip technology lsilogic.com/rapidchip
• SCSI Trade Association and newsletter www.scsita.org/

About LSI Logic Corp

LSI Logic Corp is a leading designer and manufacturer of communications, consumer and storage semiconductors for applications that access, interconnect and store data, voice and video. In addition, the company supplies storage network solutions for the enterprise. LSI Logic is headquartered at 1621 Barber Lane, Milpitas, CA 95035, and is online at www.lsilogic.com/.