Adaptec Teams Up To Bring Serial Attached SCSI Solutions To Market

Adaptec announced an initiative with leading hard disk drive manufacturers Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxtor and Seagate to deliver the industry's first Serial Attached SCSI solutions and drive market adoption through co-marketing.

The product development initiative will allow OEMs and system integrators to design and test prototype Serial Attached SCSI solutions. The efforts will also ensure compatibility of the Serial Attached SCSI interface with both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk drives to give OEMs, resellers and IT organizations unprecedented disk drive flexibility in their storage deployments. Co-marketing activities will include prototype demonstrations, speaking engagements at major trade shows, white papers on implementing Serial Attached SCSI solutions, seminars and webinars.

The Serial Attached SCSI interconnect is designed to meet next-generation computing demands for performance, scalability, flexibility and high-density environments. Adaptec's Serial Attached SCSI chips and controllers will feature the company's leading RAID technology to protect customer data and deliver industry-leading price-performance.

Adaptec's Serial Attached SCSI interface will offer new levels of customer choice by enabling customers to plug either Serial Attached SCSI or Serial ATA drives into one backplane. OEMs and IT managers will have the flexibility to configure drive arrays with either drive technology, or both, enabling the use of both high-performance and low-cost storage in the same server or networked storage subsystem.

Adaptec's Serial Attached SCSI solutions will also feature data transfer rates of 3 gigabits/second with a roadmap to 12 gigabits/second (1,200 megaBytes/second) to deliver the highest levels of system performance for bandwidth-intensive applications such as mainline storage, video editing, and streaming video and audio in direct-attached, networked-attached and networked storage environments. The solutions also will enable the use of long, thin cables and small connectors to improve chassis airflow and cooling, simplify cable routing and allow system builders to design smaller form factors.