What are the major vendors in the shared serial-attached SCSI space?
You don’t hear about SAS from NetApp or EMC. You don’t hear about SAS from vendors whose focus is on NAS or iSCSI. Why? These companies have a different value proposition and different approach. They’re using SAS as internal storage in their systems. Dell and HP are the ones you hear about. HP has really taken the lead with what they are doing with SAS at the low-end. Their MSA2000 and X series use SAS drives and the MSA2000 gives you the choice of an iSCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS interconnect. Even in its larger, scale-out systems like the X9000, HP is leveraging SAS internally. It is putting SAS in servers on the server board, same thing with Dell and IBM. It’s really the server vendors that are taking the more aggressive approach with SAS. Who is using shared serial-attached SCSI today? There are two categories. There’s the smaller company that has a smaller number of servers — maybe two up to about eight servers depending on the configuration. It might be an environment in which iSC
