Making SCSI More ViableMaking SCSI More Viable

For five years, customers have been moving away from SCSI connections for servers and storage and rushing towards Fibre Channel connections of the same kind.. But most companies still have a lot of SCSI connections in-house, and three vendors got together Monday to make it easier for them. Adaptec, Hewlett-Packard, and Seagate said they would demonstrate technology this week to make it easier for customers to stay with SCSI. The demonstration in New York will include the venerable Serial Attached SCSI interface interacting with Serial Attached SCSI drives and Serial Attached ATA drives simultaneously.

The serial attachments cut down dramatically on the amount of cable required by SCSI. It will also extend SCSI's distance within the data center. Most important, customers will be able to have an integrated rack in the data center with SCSI drives for transactions and database performance while they use the low-cost ATA drives for archiving and fixed content. HP as a partner will deploy just such a system.

Aberdeen Group analyst David Hill says the mix of SCSI drives with ATA drives will be much easier than mixing Fibre Channel drives with the low-cost drives. "SCSI will be around for a long time," he says, "because those who like SCSI always like SCSI."