What is the simplest and most cost effective way to add TERABYTES of storage to your existing server or Storage Area Network? The answer is Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Direct Attached Storage (DAS) - SAS DAS!

SAS is the next generation interconnect for enterprise hard drives, replacing the old parallel SCSI technology. With SAS External RAID Controllers, you can address up to 256 SAS or SATA drives from a single controller. This is achieved by connecting multiple JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") storage boxes to your SAS RAID Controller. Because each JBOD box contains a SAS "expander" (but no motherboard), a single 4-port 12Gbps SAS cable can carry signalling for a huge number of drives - the signal is "expanded", allowing multiple JBODs to be daisy chained to a single controller.

It's way cheaper than Fiber Channel. It's way simpler than NAS (Network Attached Storage), since you don't require any motherboards, processors, network controllers or memory in each JBOD. All each storage box is, is what it says it is, Just a Bunch Of Disks!

Here's all you need to do, to add terabytes of storage to your existing server infrastructure:

1. Open up your existing server, and find a suitable PCI-X or PCI-Express slot
2. Insert your new External SAS RAID Controller in the slot
3. Close your server
4. Connect your new DAS JBOD unit to your existing server with the 12Gbps SAS cable (you can also daisy-chain additional DAS JBODs onto existing JBOD units, powering up to 256 SAS or SATA drives)
5. Power up the server and your new DAS JBOD unit.
6. Install the External SAS RAID Controller drivers and storage software utility on your server OS.
7. Configure your RAID in the storage software utility, and mount the RAID volumes in your OS.
8. You will then see your drives as if they were directly attached to your server's RAID controller. That's because they are! No tricks, just direct attached storage!