Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) has become an ANSI standard. The SCSI Trade Association (STA) and INCITS, the International Committee for Information Technology Standards, operating with ANSI approval, has approved SAS. The parallel SCSI bus technology is reaching the end of its life and a serial version of SCSI is poised to replace it.
The specifications for the 3.0 Gbit/s SAS standard were in near-final form six months ago at which point OEMs began preparing products for market. By the end of 2003, several vendors had demonstrated working SAS products and are now beginning to announce product availability.
The SAS standard is designated as ANSI/INCITS 376-2003 and can be purchased through the INCITS website. John Lohmeyer, chair of INCITS' Technical Committee T10 and a principal engineer for LSI Logic, said, "SAS preserves the industry's software investment in SCSI command sets. Its configuration is accomplished in software using globally-unique device identifiers. The new standard will make SAS products easier to design, install and maintain due to compatibility with earlier SCSI generations."
The Serial ATA standard was approved in over a year ago, in November 2002, by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
In a neat two-step, parallel ATA and parallel SCSI are now both set to be followed by Serial ATA and Serial SCSI. Serial interconnects enable higher speeds and more devices than the shared bus ATA and SCSI designs. Drive manufacturers such as Western Digital , are already delivering SATA disk arrays. SAS arrays will surely join them throughout this year.