Is The Market Ready For SAS?

The storage industry has been wondering what will eventually replace SCSI. LSI Logic and many top hard drive vendors knew they ran out of steam with parallel busses and would someday need a new interface to achieve the next level of storage.

Enter Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and the recently released LSI SAS3442X—an eight-port SAS PCI-X Host Bus Adapter (HBA) Controller Kit that addresses the architectural limitations of its parallel counterparts.

LSI&'s eight-port boards come in three flavors: One has all eight lanes of SAS on 2x4 internal connectors (SFF-8484); the second has all eight lanes of SAS on 2x4 external connectors (SFF-8470); and the third is the one CRN Test Center engineers evaluated, the controller kit with the SFF-8484 SAS internal x4 connector and the SFF-8470 SAS external x4 connector.

The boards are built on Fusion-MPT (message passing technology) architecture, which reduces I/O overhead for more streamlined data throughput. LSI first used its Fusion technology on its Fibre Channel 1-Gigabit boards, and the technology also has been incorporated into Ultra320 SCSI products.

Each of the boards appeal to different niches in the market. The all-internal board, for example, is typically seen in environments where IT folks are replacing SCSI internal drives that were used in servers with SAS drives. The IT folks are using direct connect from the HBA to four or eight SAS drives in the server box. OEMs, on the other hand, are more interested in the all-internal boards because they are starting to build servers with the technology. System builders venturing into SAS territory may want to consider the external option and piece together some boxes for an alternative to Fibre Channel.

The LSI SAS3442X kit costs $367, which includes two SAS cables and a three-year warranty. A five-pack is $1275.