3ware
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3Ware is a major manufacturer of RAID controllers for SATA, and PATA devices. It was founded in February 1997[1] and acquired in April 2004 by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation.
3ware is a major manufacturer of RAID controllers for SATA (Serial ATA), and PATA (Parallel ATA) hard disk drives. It was founded in February 1997 by Jim McDonald and J. Peter Herz.
3ware's initial business proposition was to enable low-cost desktop disk drives to be used in applications that were traditionally based on SCSI disk drives. In 1997 the cost per byte of SCSI disk drives carried a 2x premium over ATA disk drives. Rather than converging, price premium for SCSI disk drives actually grew to over 5x by 2002. This was not because SCSI drives became more expensive, rather both SCSI and ATA per byte disk drive prices dropped, but ATA drives were riding a much steeper price and performance ramp.
The technology 3ware applied to the problem was well known in the networking world: packet switching. 3ware developed a high performance switching architecture that allows all disk drives connected to a server to deliver data with full bandwidth in parallel. The combination of high streaming performance with very low cost per byte data storage is compelling in certain applications.
SCSI and later fibre channel disk drives were offered with higher rotational rates which continued to give systems based on these technologies advantages in applications dominated by random accesses to disk data (e.g. transaction processing systems); new applications were emerging that required predominantly streaming data, high bandwidth and very large scale storage. These applications include Internet search, near-line storage, and video security. Although 3ware supports Windows operating systems and more recently Apple Macintosh, a majority of the applications 3ware serves run on Linux and BSD. The vast majority of 3ware's business was delivered via channel sales through distributors to resellers and integrators world-wide.
3ware was acquired in April 2004 by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation for $150 Million in cash.
[edit] References
- ^ http://researchlibrary.optimizemag.com/detail/ORG/991166452_644.html, accessed April 14 2006.
