Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage is alive and well. Here at the STA (SCSI Trade Association), we understand that SAS is an important storage technology for the data center, including AI. SAS is the storage infrastructure for SAS and SATA HDD-based data lakes and large repositories. SAS is still a core interface for traditional servers and storage systems with RAID cards and HBAs connected to SAS SSDs and HDDs. SAS isn’t going away anytime soon. New products and solutions from SAS vendors are in development, and large server/storage OEMs continue shipping a large volume of systems built with SAS-based storage.

Data center technologies come and go, but data storage technologies tend to change more slowly than others, such as networking, memory, and CPUs. One example is 6Gb/s SATA, the last generation of SATA. The initial 6Gb/s SATA specification (revision 3.0) was officially released in 2009 and 6Gb/s SATA is still widely used in HDDs and is even used in some SSDs. SAS (and its parallel predecessor, SCSI) has been around since 1982 (when it was originally called SASI), a whopping 43 years running! Fast forward to today’s 24G SAS, which is likely the final speed of the interface. 24G SAS was released in August 2017, and new features are being developed by the INCITS T10 Technical Committee, which meets six times a year to continue the advancement of technical specifications. 24G+ SAS, the feature-enhanced update to 24G SAS, is the current generation of SAS. With SAS-connected storage capacity forecast to grow for the next several years, SAS remains a mainstay technology in the data center. Who knows how long it will be around, but I do know it will be a long, long tail.

Check out all the SAS-based products from STA members at the STA 12Gb/s SAS and 24G SAS product page on the SNIA website. There are plenty more SAS-based products available, but we want to highlight the products of our members.