The past several years have placed an increasing burden on I/O subsystems, the direct result of an insatiable appetite for increased storage requirements for more data. This creates a growing number of applications, demanding larger blocks of data, based largely upon client requests addressed over networked servers. Dealing with this demand has spawned new protocols, new hardware, and renewed interest in serial storage architectures. This chapter will deal with the functions and technical details of Serial Storage Architecture a serial connectivity implementation for the transfer of large blocks of data, based upon established SCSI protocols.

Server data is expected to be available all the time. And this requirement applies to both enterprise and global servers. The same is true for the video server, which has mission-critical implementation with 100 percent up time.

System reconfigurations are not possible any longer when the clients are always awake and active. Still, the users expect scalability, improved performance, virtually no down time, and ease of use. The result is a new generation of serial storage I/O technology that can be applied to network computing as well as digital video and media storage for servers and non-linear editors.