Chatsworth, California-based Micropolis Corp is to support IBM Corp’s Serial Storage Architecture, and is shipping compatible disk drives to some OEM customers for evaluation and host adapter development: Micropolis says the major pieces of infrastructure necessary to support a new interface are in place, a detailed specification exists, the silicon and support tools are available and everything will be obtainable from multiple sources at prices competitive with parallel SCSI; Micropolis plans to be in volume production of Serial Storage Architecture-compatible drives later this year – SSA supports a total bandwidth of 80M-bytes per second, compared with 20M-bytes for SCSI disk drives, and also provides much lower overhead delays, giving substantially higher performance.
