Contributing Editorial: SAS Is The Next Data Center Certainty

By Jerome M Wendt and Howard Haile DCIG LLC

While SaaS (Software as a Service) gets most of the press, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is finding its way into increasing numbers of corporate data centers. Parallel SCSI is a proven and reliable data transfer standard and serves the data center well, but all good things must eventually come to an end. With U320 parallel SCSI being the last stop on the SCSI roadmap, and with the advantages SAS has to offer over parallel SCSI, SAS is almost a certainty for the industry at large and your company specifically.

SAS has already gained widespread adoption in disk-based technologies. Accelerating this adoption is the move by Dell, HP and IBM to phase out servers with native parallel SCSI interfaces in favor of SAS interfaces. As the new SAS-based servers proliferate throughout the market, this will ultimately drive the need for SAS-based peripherals, such as automated tape backup and archive solutions. The long-term result is expected to be the eventual demise of SCSI-based peripherals.