By Paul Coddington (Amphenol), Craig Foster (Teledyne LeCroy) and Rick Kutcipal (Broadcom)

The SCSI Trade Association recently hosted a webinar exploring how developers can strengthen data protection strategies through rigorous testing. The session, Reduce Your Risk of Data Loss: Critical Testing Insights for Developers, brought together storage experts to share proven methodologies for validating SAS infrastructures and ensuring reliability across complex environments.

Testing for Real-World Conditions

One focus of the webinar was how advanced protocol analyzers can be used to validate the SAS protocol under stress. By introducing controlled errors (such as dropped packets, symbol corruption, or timeouts), engineers can simulate real-world fault conditions. These tests help reveal how devices respond to corrupted data and ensure recovery mechanisms work as intended. The use of jammer and exerciser capabilities allows for both automated and programmable testing, helping teams identify potential weaknesses earlier in the development cycle.

Ensuring Cable Reliability

The discussion also highlighted the critical role of cabling in safeguarding data. With higher speeds and denser data flows, signal integrity becomes more challenging. Testing methodologies now incorporate tools to measure eye diagrams, insertion loss, and return loss across different scenarios. This helps ensure that even as speeds scale to 24G and beyond, cables maintain the quality needed for reliable communication. Proper validation reduces the risk of potential failures that can compromise system performance and data integrity.

Key Takeaways for Developers

Throughout the session, the speakers underscored that investing in robust testing pays off in fewer product issues, stronger customer confidence, and reduced risk of data loss in production environments. By leveraging modern verification tools and focusing on both devices and interconnects, developers can better anticipate problems before products reach end users.

Moving Forward

As storage speeds increase and data center workloads place new demands on infrastructure, the importance of comprehensive testing grows. Methodologies showcased in this webinar provide a framework developers can adopt to validate performance, reliability, and interoperability at every stage of product design.

For those who couldn’t attend live, the session is available on demand and on our SNIAVideo YouTube channel, offering practical insights into safeguarding data through smarter testing practices.