Compaq Computer Corp. , IBM
, LSI Logic
, Maxtor
and Seagate today announced the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group, as an independent, open, industry consortium to develop a new interconnect specification for SCSI.
The mission of the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group is to lead the industry in defining a new serial point-to-point enterprise device attach interface, leveraging the SCSI protocol set and supporting a wide range of price/performance storage products.
The Working Group is an open forum and is actively encouraging participation and contribution from additional technology companies towards developing the new specifications.
In addition, Adaptec, Fujitsu, Hitachi, QLogic, ServerWorks, and Western Digital announced their support for the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group initiative.
Serial Attached SCSI will leverage industry standards from parallel SCSI and Serial-ATA technology, to deliver an interconnect solution that will provide IT managers and integrators the flexibility to seamlessly run a wide range of serial-attached storage devices together. The final specification for Serial Attached SCSI will be determined by a wide representation of industry partners in the Working Group and appropriate industry standards organizations. The specification will be based on meeting the requirements to deliver more flexible storage I/O systems with a continued focus on reliability and cost-efficiencies.
Industry participation and collaboration will be critical towards shaping the new specification for both interface and device technologies. The intent of Serial Attached SCSI technology is to complement the evolution of ATA-based technology in the entry-level server market, as well as the continued deployment of Fibre Channel in advanced storage configurations such as SAN and NAS solutions. Serial Attached SCSI products are estimated to be available to the market in 2004.