Serial Storage Architecture

Serial Storage Architecture ( SSA) describes a method to (ie mass storage such as jukeboxes and disk arrays ) to couple high-performance storage subsystems to computers, especially for server systems or mainframe computer. SSA is the now obsolete standard and has been used mainly to systems from IBM.

SSA is a serial point- to-point connection via two write and two read ports. Many of the ideas from SSA have been incorporated into the more modern standards S -ATA and Serial Attached particular SCSI (SAS). SSA is compatible with the SCSI command set.

SSA had a very good for its time data throughput of up to 160 MB / s This was achieved by multi- parallel I / O processing in the full duplex mode.

Main use SSA found ( and still finds ) in the IBM 7133 disk subsystem. It could initially be expanded up to a total capacity of 582 GB in a tower. With modern hard drives have a maximum capacity of up to 2.34 TB per tower and a total of up to 14.0 TB per host adapter is now possible. The IBM 7133 is highly available and may reflect far away with an optical SSA Extender data up to 10 km. The system allows use of a common plate on the simultaneous connection of several UNIX, Windows NT and Novell NetWare hosts. Due to these impressive performance IBM 7133 systems can be found even today in data centers.