Talk:Digital Storage Systems Interconnect

DSSI formed the basis for the later SCSI standard

Parallel SCSI was standardized in 1986 and preceded by SASI (1979). The later DSSI couldn't form its basis. ANSI SCSI eventually superseded proprietary DSSI at DEC. --Zac67 (talk) 22:06, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, DSSI was essentially DEC taking SCSI and adding some features they needed to make it support VAXclusters, and also to make the drives a bit more feature-equivalent with SDI drives (some of which you could attach a serial console to in order to check their status and other sophisticated management stuff SCSI didn't have yet). This had the added short-term benefit for them that customers could not use third-party SCSI drives as conveniently. They could either buy expensive DSSI drives from DEC or have third-party SCSI storage subsystems that wouldn't have DEC field service support and couldn't be used as a clustering bus (losing high-availability capabilities; on a DSSI-based cluster, you could have two computers, and if one fell over, the other still had storage access). The long-term effect though was to make their systems more expensive; higher capability, yes, but also a target for budget cuts especially as unix took over. I'd like a way to put some of this in the article, but digging up cites would be tedious. Akb4 (talk) 06:59, 26 January 2025 (UTC)