Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) is an open standard for high-speed access to high-capacity disk storage. The standard is designed especially for networks, but can be used with smaller personal systems as well. The SSA standard can be an alternative to SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) in growing environments where SCSI no longer provides adequate performance.
SSA maps the pre-existing SCSI command set, so upgrading to SSA is easy. The technology allows simultaneous communication among up to 128 devices, with a total throughput of up to 160 MB/s. Each SSA node has two ports, each of which can carry two 40 MB/s exchanges simultaneously. The architecture is scalable, facilitating modular expansion of open systems environments, and is designed to be fault-tolerant. Devices can be hot-swapped; configuration is automatic. Devices can be separated by up to 25 meters (or 10 kilometers with specialized fiber optic cables).
A number of companies offer products that use SSA.