Second Plugfest Puts SAS On Track for Product Availability in Fourth Quarter

Special Two-day SAS/SATA Interoperability Session Fulfills Purpose

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2004 — The SCSI Trade Association (STA), a member-run industry consortium established to support and promote SCSI technology, announced that the second Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) plugfest, held June 21-25 at UNH-IOL, achieved major milestones in advancing the interoperability of SAS products. A special session on June 23-24 tested the interoperability of Serial ATA (SATA) products operating within SAS component infrastructures.

An open invitation was extended to any company, STA members or non-members, to attend the plugfest. The seventeen attending members were; Adaptec, Amphenol, Catalyst Enterprises, CATC, Data Transit, EqualLogic, Fujitsu CPA, HP, Hitachi GST, I-Tech, Intel, LSI Logic, Maxtor, PMC-Sierra, Seagate, Vitesse and Western Digital. All attendees brought components to be tested or test equipment for use at the plugfest, including host bus adapters, hard disk drives, backplanes, cables, connectors, expanders, analyzers and testers.

Harry Mason, President of the STA Board of Directors and Director of Industry Marketing, LSI Logic, stated, “This was the second successful SAS plugfest and it puts the industry in an excellent position to ship production products later this year. SAS continues to move forward and is on schedule to meet the originally conceived market introduction of 4th quarter, 2004. System configurations were much larger than in the March plugfest, corroborating the importance of testing a wide array of components for interoperability. The special SAS/SATA two-day test session focused on the goal of ensuring that SATA products will interoperate seamlessly in SAS systems.”

John Monroe, a Research Vice President at Gartner, said, “The industry transition to serial interfaces in all hard disk drive markets may be inevitable and inescapable, but the careful creation of solid and reliable SAS/SATA configurations will remain crucial to widespread enterprise market acceptance. These STA-sponsored plugfests are helping to accelerate the market readiness of SAS and defuse any doubts regarding the depth of forethought that went into the SAS specification. Beginning in 2005, SAS will become the heir to parallel SCSI. And Gartner predicts that — despite significant incursions of SATA and further extensions of Fibre Channel — SAS will remain the most widely integrated hard disk drive interface in multi-user environments in 2006, 2007 and 2008.”

Test equipment brought to the plugfest had noticeably matured since March, making test processes very straightforward. In addition, the variety of components was much broader and topologies were more complex. All tests were conducted at the 3Gb/s speed, with a mix of 2.5′ and 3.5′ disk drives. One large system configuration contained 38 disk drives.

STA is planning two additional plugfests later in the year (dates to be announced), both of which will be hosted by UNH-IOL and again will be open to STA members and non-members.

About the SCSI Trade Association
STA was established in 1995 to provide a focal point for members to communicate the benefits of SCSI to the industry. STA promotes the understanding and use of SCSI technology and influences the evolution of SCSI standards to meet future industry needs. The Association has an eight-member Board of Directors, which oversees the Marketing Communications and Technology Committees and all STA activities. For more information, please visit the STA web site at http://www.scsita.org , send an email toinfo@scsita.org or call the STA office at (415) 561-6273.

For more information about the plugfests, or to register for the next plugfest, please visit the STA plugfest web site at http://www.scsita.org/news_events/plugfests/plugfests.html.

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Diagram of Plugfest Test Configuration with 38 Disk Drives-pdf version

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