Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), a Western Digital company, will demonstrate a 12 gigabit per second (12Gb/s) SAS solid state drive (SSD) for enterprise servers at the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase on May 9, 2012, in Santa Clara, Calif.

SAS SSDs continue to be the building blocks of choice for enterprise and cloud storage. Enabling next-generation storage solutions, 12Gb/s SAS is a broadly supported industry standard as it delivers twice the throughput compared to today's 6Gb/s SAS solutions, while maintaining established enterprise protocols and attributes. It is also backward compatible with 6Gb/s SAS for investment protection in current SAS infrastructures.

One of the enterprise features of today's SAS drives is a second interface port that provides additional bandwidth to the drive. With 12Gb/s SAS on each of these ports, the drive can transmit and receive data at a rate of 12Gb/s, resulting in a total available interface bandwidth of 4.8GB/s per drive.

PMC-Sierra announced the availability of 12Gbps SAS protocol controllers at the end of January this year and said it has been working closely with HGST on interoperability testing.

LSI demonstrated its 12Gbps SAS expander and Input/Output (I/O) controller last November.

"We have successfully achieved interoperability between our 12Gb/s SAS drive and 12Gb/s SAS HBAs and expanders from both LSI and PMC-Sierra," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. "Meeting these interoperability milestones is critical when preparing the industry for the adoption of a new interface standard. We will continue to promote broad industry support for 12Gb/s SAS, including our sponsorship and participation in the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase on May 9."

"As the preferred enterprise interface of the future, 12Gb/s SAS will be essential to unleashing the full performance potential of SSD storage solutions to help datacenters and cloud environments contend with massive data growth and accelerate application performance. With our ongoing validation processes and compatibility testing with HGST, we are paving the way for a smooth industry transition and market adoption of 12Gb/s SAS solutions by 2013," said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI Corporation.

The SCSI Trade Association (STA) has announced the standardization of 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology, and expects the release of 12Gb/s SAS products in production volumes in 2013.

Western Digital completed in March the acquisition of the hard drive business of Hitachi. However, in order to meet the conditions of antitrust regulators, the company set up two subsidiaries, WD Technologies and HGST, with separate brands and products.