New Delhi: Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) and LSI Logic (NYSE:LSI) have started holding the industry's first public demonstration of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) dual-port and 3 Gb/s transfer rates using the world's first 2.5-inch enterprise disc drives and LSI Logic SAS1064 controller ICs, fibre channel and serial ATA.

Demonstrations at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, which started on February 17, underscore the rapid advancement of SAS product development.

Seagate and LSI Logic have taken a lead in developing the market for this evolutionary storage technology that boasts the most flexible enterprise I/O with proven performance, scalability and compatibility, enabling IT professionals to consolidate enterprise storage solutions and thus significantly lower infrastructure costs.

Seagate plans to deliver its first SAS products after this year, extending its broad product line and building on the company's history of market leadership with new interfaces including SCSI, fibre channel and serial ATA.

LSI Logic has announced plans to provide the industry's most comprehensive family of SAS controllers, expanders, host bus adapters and ROMB and RAID storage adapter solutions. LSI Logic is hosting companion demonstrations to feature multiple SAS and serial ATA disc drives, and SAS protocol compliance.

Serial Attached SCSI is the next step for the industry's storage I/O standard interface. SAS technology extends SCSI interface solutions beyond Ultra320 to the next-generation direct attach storage (DAS) server and workstation markets while retaining device-level backward compatibility.

Because the SAS physical layer is compatible with SATA, users will have the choice of populating SAS systems with either SATA or SAS hard disc drives, or a combination of both. Boasting features that liberate SCSI from its parallel predecessor, SAS delivers new levels of breakthrough speed and connectivity while retaining the functionality and reliability.

With enterprise storage requirements escalating and becoming more complex, factors such as data centre consolidation, security, scalability and accessibility are more critical than ever. Enterprise data centres must be online all the time, fulfil requests from numerous users simultaneously, allow for constant growth and expansion and be maintained while in operation. Serial attached SCSI meets all these demands while providing the highest performance at optimal capacity points.

In enterprise environments that demand reliability, high-availability and performance, dual port is an essential feature to ensure a stable system environment as well as to enable added performance for DAS subsystems.