by Harry Mason

This article is the first in a two-part series exploring the future of Serial Attached SCSI. Read the second part here.

There are a lot of terms being used for the latest information technology architectures. Big data, cloud computing, data centers and storage-as-a-service are a few and they are all various forms of enterprise computing. Within these environments, numerous technologies are used to assist with implementing and managing mission critical data such as Hadoop (an open-source project that allows enterprises a new way to store and analyze data), virtualization, OpenStack, dedupe and RAID. For building and maintaining enterprise storage, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and its predecessor SCSI, have long served as the foundation by providing a serviceable slot architecture which contributes to high availability, high reliability and a high degree of serviceability and usability.