The initial demonstration took place at Storage Networking World 2004 in Orlando Florida last month and was followed by successful participation in the Interoperability "Plugfest," held recently at the University of New Hampshire. Over 20 companies participated in the SAS Plugfest event hosted by The SCSI Trade Association, which brought together the leaders in SAS storage technology.

"We are impressed both with the speed the emerging SAS technology solutions are developing and the performance demonstrated by these components," said Malcolm Muggeridge, Chief Technical Officer for Xyratex Storage Systems. "At SNW we achieved 800MB/s data access with relative ease soon after beginning the technology demonstration. The ability to access SAS devices, and to use SAS infrastructure to access S-ATA devices, makes a compelling case for the technology and its implementation."

Offering enhanced performance, reliability and scalability, SAS overcomes many of the current limitations associated with the traditional parallel SCSI implementations. SAS's ability to support either native SAS or S-ATA disk drives allows end-users to meet both their capacity and performance needs with a single infrastructure.

Xyratex expects to begin delivering SAS enabled enclosures and technology to our OEM customers in the first half of 2005.

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