The SAS Storage Architecture book is intended as a tutorial and to serve as
classroom materials for the training MindShare delivers on this subject. It
should be considered a companion to the SAS standard, helping to clarify and
explain the concepts and provide the motivation for decisions that were made
in the creation of the standard and decisions that will need to be made by
adopters of it. While the author was given permission by the SCSI Trade Associ-
ation to use illustrations from the materials that went into the standard, this
book does not attempt to recreate material from it that should rightly be consid-
ered reference material.
SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is the serial storage interface that has been designed to replace and upgrade SCSI, by far the most popular storage interface for high-performance systems for many years. Retaining backward compatibility with the millions of lines of code written to support SCSI devices, SAS incorporates recent advances in high-speed serial design to provide better performance, better reliability and enhanced capabilities, all at a lower cost. SAS will be a significant part of many future high-performance storage systems, and hardware designers, system validation engineers, device driver developers and others working in this area will need a working knowledge of it. SAS Storage Architecture provides a comprehensive guide to the SAS standard. The book contains descriptions and numerous examples of the concepts presented, using the same building block approach as other MindShare offerings. This book details important concepts relating to the design and implementation of storage networks. Specific topics of interest include: SATA Compatibility
Expander devices
Discovery Process
Connection protocols
Arbitration of competing connection requests
Flow Control protocols
ACK/NAK protocol
Primitives construction and uses
Frames format, definition, used of each field
Error checking mechanisms
Description of responsibilities for each layer:
Application layer mode and log pages
Transport Layer frame construction
Port Layer call center model
Link Layer establish and maintain connections
Phy Layer OOB, Initialization, and Reset
Physical Layer connectors and cables
Serial Support serial transmission support requirements
The future of SAS competition with SATA and Fibre Channel in the server marketplace
