3ware
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| 3ware | |
|---|---|
| Type | Subsidiary, Public: NASDAQ: AMCC |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Headquarters |  Sunnyvale, California, USA |
| Key people | Barbara Murphy, SVP, GM |
| Employees | ~75 |
| Website | www.3ware.com |
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3ware is a manufacturer of RAID controllers for Serial Attached SCSI, Serial ATA, and Parallel ATA devices. It was founded in February 1997 by Mitch Altman, J. Peter Herz and Jim MacDonald. In April 2006, Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) acquired 3ware for $150 million in cash. Now, 3ware (also referred to as "AMCC Storage") is a business unit within AMCC and is managed by Barbara Murphy.
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.
3ware's differentiation from competitive offerings is its own proprietary I/O processor, trademarked as StorSwitch. The technology 3ware applied to scale performance is well known in the networking world: packet switching. 3ware developed a high performance switching architecture that allows all disk drives connected to a 3ware RAID controller 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 many applications.
Prior to the acquisition by AMCC, 3ware marketed its products under the brand name "Escalade." Now, AMCC uses the brand "3ware" for its 7006/7506 (Parallel ATA), 8006/9500S/9550SX(U)/9650SE (Serial ATA) and 9690SA (Serial Attached SCSI) families of RAID controllers.
