Features - Storage Innovations:

ADAPTEC ANNOUNCES HIGHEST PERFORMANCE END-TO-END SAS FAMILY

Adaptec Inc announced that it is extending its new Adaptec Flexible Storage Architecture with an end-to-end Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) product family -- including the industry's first SAS subsystem and boards powered by the highest performance SAS ASIC with integrated RAID data protection -- that will be demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). Adaptec's ability to develop an entire product family based on next-generation SAS technology validates the power of the Adaptec FSA development platform of mix-and-match components, systems, and software.

Parallel SCSI is currently the mainstream storage interconnect while SAS is the next generation interface that brings many improvements in performance, scalability, reliability and form factor over parallel SCSI. SAS is designed for high-performance enterprise requirements and is a superset of Serial ATA (SATA), which is the storage interface for desktop and entry-enterprise environments. SAS offers both the benefits of backward compatibility with SCSI and interoperability with SATA, bringing enterprises a flexibility and cost savings previously not possible for traditional storage environments. SAS-based solutions are ideal for organizations with bandwidth-intensive applications, transaction processing systems, mainline storage requirements and rich media types such as video.

The Adaptec SAS ASIC, a chip that will power SAS workstations and servers, is the industry's fastest to date, delivering unprecedented 4.8GB per second performance, seven times that of Ultra320 SCSI, the fastest parallel SCSI technology available today. It is the foundation of a broad family of new Adaptec SAS controllers and boards with advanced RAID capabilities, featuring eight ports -- the highest port count available -- to deliver maximum data speed and industry-leading configuration flexibility for internal and external storage. With the Adaptec SAS ASIC, organizations can easily scale server and workstation storage to 100-disk drive configurations, well beyond the limits of SCSI, to meet ever-expanding storage capacity needs. In addition, the ASIC features the industry's lowest heat and power requirements, enabling small, cool-running systems to help drive the industry's transition to smaller, higher-capacity solutions.

"Adaptec is firmly committed to SAS and is extending its leadership to this emerging market with an industry-first demonstration of high-performance SAS components, systems and software on display at IDF this week," said Ahmet Houssein, vice president and general manager of Adaptec's OEM business. "Through Adaptec's aggressive development of this next generation interface, including several industry-first SAS implementations and performance levels, our OEM and channel partners are able to benefit with time-to-market advantages of SAS offerings."

Industry's First SAS Subsystem

Designed for easy expansion of direct-attached and network-attached storage, the solution will be shown storing information transmitted by two new Adaptec SAS controllers -- one with Adaptec HostRAID (integrated RAID 0, 1 and 10) and the other with enterprise-class Adaptec SystemRAID capabilities for the highest levels of data protection. The demonstration illustrates how SAS devices can be used to build high-availability systems that feature no single point of failure, and support highly reliable and scalable connections such as multi-node clustering for automatic failover availability or load balancing, a topology that is vital for mission-critical applications.

Adaptec's new SAS offerings are part of the Adaptec FSA, a new development platform that enables components, systems and software to be mixed-and-matched with Adaptec's Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI or iSCSI components to deliver unique storage solutions. The versatility of the Adaptec FSA means that OEMs and channel partners can design a system that is ideal for both high performance/ high availability enterprise applications (SAS), as well as cost-effective bulk storage (SATA) in a single platform. Since the core storage technology is already developed, tested and qualified, OEMs and channel partners can save significant development time and effort in delivering best-of-breed storage solutions to market.

Houssein continued, "Adaptec is unique in that we are delivering an end-to-end SAS product line of components, systems and software that is interchangeable with the rest of our components, systems, and software. That is the promise of the Adaptec FSA -- to deliver the kind of value, flexibility and time-to-market advantages that are critical to win in today's rapidly changing marketplace."

Adaptec PCI Express, Serial-Attached SCSI for Next-Generation Computing

Adaptec's SAS RAID controller with advanced data protection and an Adaptec Ultra320 SCSI RAID card will also be shown in the PCI Express Pavilion as Adaptec's first PCI Express offerings. PCI Express is a new serial host interconnect architecture designed to address a wide range of current and future system interconnect requirements by delivering the flexibility, scalability and performance needed to support SAS and upcoming technologies including 10 Gb Ethernet.