Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

STORAGE LEADERS ATTEND LARGEST-EVER SAS PLUGFEST

The largest-ever multi-company SAS plugfest to date brought more than 100 engineers together to fine-tune storage products and to foster interoperability between Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage devices, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) and the SCSI Trade Association (STA) announced.

SAS is the rapidly-advancing, high-speed alternative to the storage interface technologies being used today. It represents a reincarnation of the long-established SCSI protocol in a powerful form designed to meet the high-performance requirements of enterprise data centers.

Sponsored by STA, the third and final plugfest of 2004 was held during the first week of November. The plugfest provided a crucible for testing interoperability between different manufacturers' SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) products, many of which are expected to enter the market in early 2005. While some attendees tested systems, most tested components -- the chips, boards, hard disk drives, cables and connectors -- that will be sold to OEMs building and selling tomorrow's data storage solutions.

Among the companies attending the November Plugfest were STA members Adaptec, Amphenol, Broadcom, CATC/LeCroy, Catalyst, Dell, EqualLogic, Finisar, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, I-TECH, Intel, LSI Logic, Maxtor, NEC, PMC-Sierra, Seagate and Vitesse.

"2004 marks the culmination of three years' investment in the development of the SAS protocol and products," commented Harry Mason, president of the SCSI Trade Association and director of industry marketing at LSI Logic. "We couldn't be more pleased with the results of the three plugfests held this year. Industry participation increased with each event as did the maturity of SAS components, subsystems, systems and test coverage. The benefits are already apparent and will greatly improve SAS's acceptance during the early deployment phase."

"We've seen very positive progress through the three plugfests we've held so far toward both fine-tuning the standards and fostering industry-wide interoperability," said David Woolf, a manager of the UNH-IOL SAS Consortium. "Cooperation between manufacturers at this level can only help drive market adoption. We are now in the process of building a permanent SAS test bed of consortium-member companies that we hope will serve between the plugfests as the SAS and SATA reference environment for the industry."

The next STA Plugfest has been tentatively scheduled for the week of April 25, 2005, although an interim group test may be scheduled earlier in the year. The UNH-IOL also runs SAS and related SATA Consortiums, separate associations of companies building new products and interested in testing them on an ongoing basis.