ATTO Technology and Hitachi Global Storage Technology (Hitachi GST) have announced today their 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products are now designed to work with each other, offering a reliable solution for server and storage applications. Hitachi's Ultrastar C10K300 hard drives have been featured with ATTO's ExpressSAS host bus adapter to deliver a fast 6GB/s data transfer, required by high I/O enterprise environments. The combination of these two products will provide server systems with storage solutions that double the performance of the previous-generation 3Gb/s SAS connection.

“We are pleased to collaborate with ATTO Technology to demonstrate interoperability between our respective products and underscore the numerous benefits of the new serial interconnect,” said Brendan Collins, vice president, Product Marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “The 6Gb/s SAS interface delivers outstanding performance that is well-suited to meet the requirements of today’s most demanding enterprise server and storage applications. Our first 6Gb/s SAS product, the Hitachi Ultrastar C10K300, is delivering impressive performance benchmarks and receiving an extremely favorable response from customers.”

The new interface has been designed to be backward compatible with the existing 3Gb/s products and offers an easy way for enterprise users to upgrade to the 6Gb/s platforms. The new ATTO 6Gb/s ExpressSAS host adapters have been made available in five models in 8- and 16-port configurations. These provide a performance of 600MB/s per port, offering support for up to 512 physical devices. The adapters come as a perfect addition for the Hitachi C10K300 hard drives, which are available in both 147GB and 300GB capacities.

Thanks to the backward compatibility of the new 6Gb/s SAS interface, the new Hitachi drives coupled with the ATTO ExpressSAS host adapters will allow for an easy migration to the latest performance in server storage. According to both companies, the new solutions are now shipping to OEM and distributors worldwide.