Serial SCSI ready to dominate enterprise HDDs

• LSI announced shipments of more than 2 million serial attached storage (SAS) IC units
• IDC reportedly predicted that in 2007 SAS will achieve 26% enterprise HDD market share
• SAS is gearing up to replace parallel SCSI for direct attached and network storage enterprise markets
• Will SAS put pressure on Fibre channel drive prices?

LSI announced that they have shipped a total of 2 million serial attached SCSI (SAS) ICs. This number is probably close to one year’s shipment since SAS has only begun to ramp in 2006. Since total enterprise (SCSI and FC) drive shipments in 2006 were about 28 million units this corresponds to a bit over 7 % SAS shipments into the traditional enterprise market in 2006 (for LSI). The IDC projection implies that in 2007 there will be close to 8 million SAS disk drives shipped. This implies about 4X growth in one year for SAS shipments.

SAS makes a lot of sense for the enterprise market. Not only does the interface get around the speed limitations of parallel SCSI but it also allows coexistence on a bus of SAS as well as SATA interface disk drives. This allows designers to consider tiered storage in a box---providing different cost/performance storage devices in a single rack or box. It is likely that by the end of 2007 SAS will be dominate, although the slow qualification time and longer product life for enterprise storage systems will keep parallel SCSI alive longer that was the case for Serial ATA (SATA), which now totally dominates the consumer and PC markets.

LSI has had a significant percentage of the total SAS market. Starting at 80% when these products started in late 2005 the company now maintains a majority share of this market with Seagate one of their strongest customers (Seagate controls close to 60% of the total traditional enterprise HDD market). Marvell is another major SAS IC supplier. LSI recently acquired Agere which had been developing its own SAS technology.

SAS provides faster SCSI interfaces putting additional pressure on the higher priced Fibre Channel interface disk drives. The growth of SAS products will put increasing price pressure on Fibre Channel products and trim some of the profit margin off of these drives. Note that already Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives are the fastest growing enterprise storage category where time to data is secondary to online low cost storage access.