Features - Storage Innovations:

ADAPTEC DEMONSTRATES SERIAL ATTACHED SCSI PROTOTYPE CHIP

Adaptec Inc, a global leader in storage solutions, achieved another industry milestone today by demonstrating the first prototype Serial Attached SCSI chip architected to run at both 3- and 6-gigabits/second.

Early delivery of the Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI chip will allow original equipment manufacturers to begin early design and development of first-generation 3 gigabit/second Serial Attached SCSI systems. In addition, the chip's architecture will enable Adaptec to accelerate development of 6- gigabit/second solutions, reducing cost and speeding time-to-market.

The Adaptec chip is a prototype of a design that will support both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk drives. Adaptec also is demonstrating a Serial Attached SCSI backplane that supports both drive types. Adaptec is demonstrating the prototype Serial Attached SCSI chip working with a prototype Serial Attached SCSI hard disk drive from Seagate Technology this week at HP World in Atlanta. The joint demonstration in booth 443 at the Georgia World Congress Center will show both read and write commands between the controller and the disk drive prototype. A Serial Attached SCSI analyzer will show the command traffic.

"Market interest in the benefits of Serial Attached SCSI -- such as legacy SCSI protocol compatibility and an ability to neatly scale to smaller form factors -- continues to build, and it looks like SAS will be quickly and formally approved as a standard interface," said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner Dataquest. "We should begin to see complete SAS storage systems by mid 2004. If the major OEMs remain committed to SAS -- and this appears likely -- the new interface will become a substantial part of the enterprise storage landscape in 2005 and 2006."

Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI Leadership

Building on Adaptec's Serial Attached SCSI leadership, the HP World demonstration comes less than two months after Adaptec debuted the Serial Attached SCSI interface's ability to support both Serial ATA drives for costsensitive applications and enterprise-class Serial Attached SCSI drives.

Serial Attached SCSI drives will deliver first-generation data transfer rates of 3 gigabits/second with a roadmap to 6 gigabits/second and 12 gigabits/second (1,200 megabytes/second), providing the highest levels of performance and reliability for bandwidth-intensive enterprise applications such as databases, streaming video and audio, mainline storage and video editing.

"Organizations need greater system performance, scalability and disk drive flexibility as they work to more efficiently manage and store rapidly growing amounts of data," said Brian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service. "Serial Attached SCSI will meet these requirements by leveraging the SCSI protocol to deliver new levels of priceperformance."

Serial Attached SCSI -- Greater Reliability and Scalability, Smaller Footprint

Serial Attached SCSI will enable new levels of scalability, supporting storage configurations of more than 16,000 mixed Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk drives. The next-generation storage interface will feature dual porting to enable high-availability systems with no single points of failure, maximizing reliability.

Serial Attached SCSI's small cabling and connectors support enterprise- class 2 1/2-inch disk drives that will enable high-density storage systems. Serial Attached SCSI also reduces power requirements and heat generation to enable smaller storage system form factors.

"Adaptec is working closely with Seagate and other leading disk drive makers to accelerate the delivery of complete Serial Attached SCSI solutions and to drive this important technology transition for OEMs and resellers," said Ahmet Houssein, vice president and general manager of Adaptec's Storage Solutions Group. "Our joint efforts will speed time-to-market for system builders as they work to deliver greater storage throughput, scalability and flexibility for their enterprise customers. We are pleased to be highlighting the compatibility of our chip technology and backplane design with both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk drives at HP World."