In today's economy, cost-effective, performance- oriented, scalable and reliable storage solutions are fundamental to success. Today's IT managers as well as storage vendors need to keep their competitive edge by continuing to reduce the cost of their operations and solutions. No matter what the company size, the process of scrutinizing access time to data is occurring. As the value to the access of data increases the utilization of storage resources, it also exposes the issue that not all data is the same. Often, this is a function of the age of data. IT managers are looking for more cost-effective, high-performance storage, as well as to maximize the efficiency of their IT spending.

This paper explores SAS -- a relatively new entry into the disk drive market -- as a very viable replacement for Fibre Channel based (FC) disk drives. Although it is not a complete replacement for FC, SAS will eventually come to command the midrange disk market for external storage.