Catalyst Announces SAS Zoning Support
San Jose, CA, October 17, 2005 - Catalyst Enterprises, Inc., a leading manufacturer of advanced design verification and test tools for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Advanced Serial ATA (SATA), PCI ExpressTM,USB 2.0, and other technologies, today announced support for SAS Zoning on its STX MasterTM, Series of SAS protocol analyzers. These new capabilities provide developers various display, decode, and configuration enhancements needed to fully characterize SAS systems which employ zoning.
“Catalyst has been working closely with industry leaders involved in the definition of specification requirements for zoning as well as the development of new products that support this feature,” stated Paul Mutschler, director of storage products, Catalyst Enterprises, Inc. “This feature addition directly addresses a leading-edge standards enhancement and assists our customers in meeting delivery schedules for products designed to implement such enhancements.”
“The delivery of this feature addition on the Catalyst STX system served a key role in expediting the design and validation processes of our SAS Expanders that support SAS zoning,” stated Peter Wong, Director, Strategic Marketing, PMC-Sierra. “Test tools that evolve quickly to meet the demands of new standards requirements enable us to quickly and confidently introduce new products to market.”
SAS Zoning Provides Access Control and Security Mechanisms
In May 2005, industry leaders submitted the SAS Zoning Proposal to the ANSI INCITS T10 committee. The T10 committee authorized formation of a working group, tasked to complete the Zoning specification for the upcoming SAS-2 standard. SAS Zoning, an access control mechanism, provides for segregation of traffic within a SAS topology, allowing initiator and target device to see only the portions of the topology for which they have been assigned permissions. Permissions are assigned by way of a permission table. Zoning-capable expander devices interoperate in order to fully define this table and to control the resulting zone group memberships. SAS Zoning supports up to 128 separately zoned groups within a topology.
Providing a Total Solution
Support for zoning is the latest in a series of powerful feature enhancements to Catalyst’s hardware-based SAS/SATA analyzer/emulator solution. The STX Master Series is an all-in-one development solution for