Dell Serial Attached SCSI 5iR Integrated and Adapter User Manual

Page 64

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Glossary

RPM

RPM, short for "Red Hat Package Manager" is a
package management system primarily intended for
Linux. RPM installs, updates, uninstalls, verifies and
queries software. RPM is the baseline package format
of the Linux Standard Base. Originally developed by
Red Hat for Red Hat Linux, RPM is now used by many
Linux distributions. It has also been ported to some
other operating systems such as NetWare by Novell.

S

SAS

Serial-Attached SCSI, SAS, is a serial, point-to-point,
enterprise-level device interface that leverages the
proven SCSI protocol set. The SAS interface provides
improved performance, simplified cabling, smaller
connectors, lower pin count, and lower power
requirements when compared to parallel SCSI.

SATA

Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, a physical
storage interface standard, is a serial link that provides
point-to-point connections between devices. The
thinner serial cables allow for better airflow within the
system and permit smaller chassis designs.

SCSI

SCSI stands for "Small Computer System Interface,"
a processor-independent standard interface for
system-level interfacing between a computer and
intelligent devices including hard-drives, floppy disks,
CD-ROM, printer, scanners and many more.

SCSIport

SCSIport driver is a Microsoft

®

driver for Windows

®

storage architecture, delivering SCSI commands to
the storage targets. The SCSIport driver works well
with storage using parallel SCSI.

Serial Architecture

Serial architectures have emerged to deliver higher
performance by allowing more bandwidth per device
pathway than their parallel counterparts. Serial
architecture connections consist of a single pair of
transmission signals that contain an embedded clock
for self-clocking, enabling clock speed to be easily
scaled. Serial bus architectures also support a network
of dedicated point-to-point device connections,
versus the multi-drop architectures of parallel buses,
to deliver full bandwidth to each device, eliminate the
need for bus arbitration, reduce latency, and greatly
simplify hot-plug and hot-swap system
implementations.

Serial Technology

Serial storage technology, specifically Serial ATA,
Serial-Attached SCSI and PCI Express, address the
architectural limitations of their parallel counterparts
to deliver highly scalable performance. The
technology draws its name from the way it transmits
signals - in a single stream, or serially, compared to
multiple streams for parallel. The main advantage of
serial technology is that while it moves data in a single
stream, it wraps data bits into individual packets that
are transferred up to 30 times faster than parallel
technology data.

YD912bk1.book Page 62 Monday, April 2, 2007 4:39 PM

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