It was developed by IBM employee Ian Judd in 1990 to provide data redundancy for critical applications.
[1] A number of vendors including IBM, Pathlight Technology and Vicom Systems produced products based on SSA.
IBM produced a number of successful products based upon this standard before it was overtaken by the more widely adopted Fibre Channel protocol.
SSA detects interruptions in the loop and automatically reconfigures the system to help maintain connection while a link is restored.
The copper cables used in SSA configurations are round bundles of two or four twisted pairs, up to 25 metres long and terminated with 9-pin micro-D connectors.