Contact:
Lynn Barra
lbarra@itic.org
202-626-5739

INCITS Announces Serial Attached SCSI Standard
Standard Enables Successor to Parallel SCSI

Washington, DC – November 6, 2003 – The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) announces the approval of the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) standard, with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accepting it quickly as an American National Standard.  The new SAS SCSI standard, developed by INCTS Technical Committee T10 and designated as INCITS 376, is the next generation to parallel SCSI.

The SCSI family of standards provides for many different transport protocols that define the rules for exchanging information between different SCSI devices. This standard defines the rules for exchanging information between SCSI devices using a serial interconnect. This standard also defines rules that permit SAS hosts to communicate with Serial ATA devices using the same serial interconnect.

“In terms of increases in speed and performance, SAS has a longer life than parallel SCSI,” said John Lohmeyer of LSI Logic Corporation and Chair of INCITS/T10. “An important differentiation is that all serial interfaces are self-clocking, so unlike parallel SCSI, data rates can be pushed higher and higher.”

The next meeting of INCITS/T10, which is open to all interested parties, is scheduled for January 12-16, 2004 in Chandler, AZ hosted by Intel Corporation.  For further information, contact lohmeyer@t10.org .

About INCITS
INCITS (www.incits.org ) is the primary U.S. focus of standardization in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) encompassing storage, processing, transfer, display, management, organization, and retrieval of information. As such, INCITS also serves as the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) Technical Advisory Group for ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. JTC 1 is responsible for International standardization in the field of information technology. INCITS is accredited by ANSI and operates under its rules, designed to ensure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of directly and materially affected interests.

INCITS Executive Board of supplier and customer members includes Apple Computer, EIA, Farance Inc., Food Marketing Institute (FMI), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ICCP, IEEE, Intel, Microsoft, Network Appliance, NIST, Office of the Secretary Defense /Science & Technology, Oracle, Panasonic Technologies, Purdue University, Sony Electronics, Sun Microsystems, the Uniform Code Council, and Unisys.