3ware

3ware was an American electronics company founded in February 1997 by Mitch Altman, J. Peter Herz and Jim McDonald.
History
The company was funded in 1999 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Funding came from New Enterprise Associates and Selby Venture Partners, and individual investors.
Products were marketed under the brand name "Escalade."
In April 2004, Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) acquired 3ware for $150 million in cash and became an AMCC product line brand (manufacturing RAID controllers for Serial Attached SCSI, Serial ATA, and Parallel ATA devices). 3ware (also referred to as "AMCC Storage") then became a product brand name of AMCC storage offering, and the product line was managed by Russell Johnson.
AMCC used 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.
Faye Pairman headed the storage business unit at AMCC.
AMCC / 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 developed its own I/O processor, trademarked as StorSwitch. The technology 3ware applied to scale performance was well known in the networking world: packet switching. 3ware developed a high performance switching architecture that allowed all disk drives connected to a 3ware RAID controller to deliver data with full bandwidth in parallel.
In April 2009, LSI Corporation bought the 3ware RAID adapter business from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation. They, in turn, become part of Avago.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu