| The 3ware® family of high-capacity SwitchedRAID® storage solutions is
designed to deliver reliable, enterprise class RAID storage using low cost ATA
and SATA drives. 3ware is able to deliver unparalleled performance because of its
advanced StorSwitch™ architecture – a non-blocking switched fabric that
communicates with each drive via a unique port identifier.
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| Since 1999, when Escalade was introduced, customers have successfully implemented
3ware products in applications designed to meet the explosive demand for cost-effective,
scalable storage. Much of this continued success is attributed to 3ware's knowledge of the
individual applications and our drive to deliver a superior solution.
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| In addition to the traditional ATA RAID applications, the advent of serial ATA (SATA) RAID
has allowed customers to deploy our products in the following applications:
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- Corporate files servers
- Tape replacement and near-line storage
- NAS and SAN
- Data retention and archives
- Video-on-Demand
- Security and surveillance systems
- Digital image capture
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| Corporate files servers: The low cost and reliability of SATA RAID
makes this an ideal solution for insuring all data is protected by the benefits
of RAID. Home directories, email servers, and corporate file servers can all be
RAIDed.
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| Tape replacement and near-line storage: SATA storage is a very cost-competitive
alternative to tape. Disk-based technologies offer two additional benefits over tape
systems: (1) they can be written at disk speeds, thereby dramatically reducing the time
to backup your data, and (2) they can be read easily, using normal file system commands,
resulting in very rapid recovery and restoration of backup data.
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| NAS and SAN: The trend in servers is to move the storage out of the server and onto
a NAS or SAN network. NAS and SAN vendors are already building solutions containing ATA
drives. SATA will accelerate this trend because it’s point-to-point connection topology
makes it easier to connect large numbers of drives to a single controller and create RAID
sets. The result is less expensive NAS and SAN solutions.
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| Data retention and archives: Government regulations from Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA) the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
to ISO 17799, have drastically changed storage requirements. Compliant data has three characteristics
that contribute to the swelling numbers, (1) data must be retained for longer periods of time, (2) it
must be readily accessible, and (3) it must be capable of being accessed by a number of sources. SATA
technology can simplify this significantly because disk-based technology offers all the benefits of
speed for archival and retrieval; and the hot swap features of SATA enable the ability to manage SATA
disk drives with robots, thereby allowing researchers to "load" and "unload" the
drive or drives they want, and perform data analysis much more easily.
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| Video-on-Demand: This market has a unique requirement-it cannot tolerate a disruption in the
data flow or the picture you’re viewing on the screen will glitch. In a typical file system application,
drive latency can be tolerated because the user is more interested in getting the data than in getting
it fast. In streaming video, however, there is a critical time window in which the data must be delivered
or the video image becomes disrupted. The requirement, therefore, is that the latency associated with data
reading and writing must be very small, and must also be consistent. Traditional bus-based storage
architectures like SCSI and ATA have difficulty meeting the performance and latency requirements of video
streaming. However, SATA’s point-to-point architecture solves both problems by allowing drive aggregation
for higher performance, and virtually eliminating arbitration latency. Use of RAID, particularly RAID 10,
which combines mirroring and striping, provides both high speed and redundancy, which is ideal for this
market.
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| Security and surveillance systems: Another market in the digital video arena is security storage
based on disk drive technology instead of videotape. By combining disk drive technology with software, it
is possible to have highly intelligent security systems that can store effective and relevant data on disk
where it can be quickly searched for security events.
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| Digital image capture: Whether the need is for satellite, oceanographic, seismic or space image
capture, the challenges for these supercomputing applications are the same – capture large amounts of data
to disk for later analysis. SATA provides the highly reliable, high capacity and cost effective solution
that this supercomputing environment demands.
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