What is Serial Storage Architecture (SSA)?
Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) is an open protocol that enables fast data transfer between hard drives, clusters and servers. SSA is an industry and user-driven storage interface technology.
The SSA concept was developed by IBM engineer Ian Judd in the early 1990s. IBM developed several SSA products, including hard drive enclosures, storage servers, and host bus adapters. SSA products are based on the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) standard.
Applications such as e-commerce, video-on-demand, and video conferencing are rapidly evolving due to expanded network infrastructures and computer processing speeds. Such applications use networks to meet data demands and require systems with adequate storage capacity, fault tolerance, and high data bandwidth.
In order to meet the increasing demands on storage systems, the SSA standard was developed for use in mainframe environments, networked computer systems and small systems. SSA offers a powerful Serial Attached Technology (SAT) for connecting drives and servers.
SSA is configured with two point-to-point connections that are connected via the ports of two different devices. A node, e.g. For example, a two-port storage device is connected to two other storage devices by two pairs of links. If each storage device has two ports, they can easily be linked as an SSA loop. The SSA configuration provides a connection bandwidth of 20 MB / s and a total data bandwidth of 80 MB / s.
SSA benefits include:
- Enables spatial reuse as links do not interfere with neighboring nodes.
- Supports simultaneous full duplex data transmission.
- Provides data security through fault tolerance.
- Supports hard disk drive hot swapping.
- Detects malfunctions and automatically resets systems without interrupting the connection.
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