Seagate Technology will demonstrate a variety of technologies at the SCSI trade association (STA) technology showcase this week aimed at improving the performance of servers, datacenters and cloud computing applications, including the first public demonstration of solid-state drives with Serial Attached SCSI 12Gb/s interface. Seagate's rival Hitachi GST will also demo its SSDs with SAS-12Gb/s interface at the same event.

Seagate will show its next-gen enterprise solid-state drives working with the new 12Gb/s SAS standard at the showcase. The new standard doubles the data throughput of industry-standard drives equipped with the enhanced SAS interface, enabling much faster server and storage solutions. The enhanced standard also fully maintains the rich data integrity, scalability, serviceability, and hot swappable protocol feature set that enterprises depend on to safeguard critical data, minimize costly downtime, and ensure infrastructures easily keep up with growing data storage demands.

Faster data throughput paves the way for drives and storage systems that can deliver larger amounts of data more rapidly to servers and processors. This provides improved overall performance and efficiency for cloud services and other enterprise applications throughout all tiers of data storage.

While Seagate will first demonstrate the technology on its solid-state drives to optimize the high performance benefits of SSDs, the 12Gb/s SAS standard is also compatible with high-performance and high-capacity hard disk drives. These can be seamlessly integrated within existing infrastructures using 6Gb/s SAS because the new faster SAS standard is backwards compatible with all previous generations of SAS speeds. Seagate’s implementation of 12Gb/s SAS is fully compatible with controllers and other technologies from PMC-Sierra and LSI, two of the leading host bus adapter and expander vendors.

The 12Gb/s SAS standard is currently stable and expected to be finalized by the end of the year. Products based on the 12Gb/s standard will start to hit in the market in 2013 with general availability in the second half of the year.

Tags: Seagate, SCSI, SAS, SSD, HDD