I'll save the postmortem wrap-up for next week, but my marine metaphor reminds me that not everything happens on the show floor here at SNW -- and I'm not talking about executives chatting it up during a round of golf.

Instead, Bell Microproducts took to the sea and chose a real vessel moored in the beautiful San Diego Bay -- instead of an SNW booth -- to demo its new Hammer line (http://weblog.infoworld.com/prodblog/archives/2006/03/bell_microprodu.html) of entry-level storage devices. Renamed the "SS Zetera" -- appropriate because the devices are based on Zetera's Z-SAN technology (http://www.zetera.com/technology/overview.html) -- for the show's duration, the yacht is certainly one of the most scenic demo spaces I've ever seen at an SNW show.

Back on land, I was enthralled by two revolutionary new products, starting with the SAS (serial attached SCSI) switch that LSI Logic announced last week (http://weblog.infoworld.com/prodblog/archives/2006/03/lsi_logic_annou.html).

The newborn switch connects hosts and storage devices using the SAS protocol exclusively, creating an interesting alternative to using FC (Fibre Channel) for short-range storage networks.

SAS switches are a perfect complement to all the other novelties recently brought under this technology's umbrella, including HBAs (host bus adapters), RAID controllers, and disk drives. Because of their compatibility with SAS, I'll also add SATA (serial ATA) devices to that bunch.