History 2003: 3ware from iSCSI to Switched RAID

3ware is among a rare class of storage start-ups with every chance for survival.

There are two good reasons for this: 1) it has an exciting product line and has already begun to sell it; 2) it has plenty of cash to keep its activities afloat.

“We’ve received total funding of $86 million, with $26 million raised last December, which leaves us plenty to live on for the next 3 or 4 years,” said VP of WW sales Mark Egerton.

And yet, things weren’t always so rosy. When the California-based company first started in 1997, with a line of iSCSI switches called Palisade, delays in normalization of its new standard, i.e. its acceptance on the market, forced the company to abandon this technology.

3ware then decided to start from scratch just over a year ago, with a new idea: switched RAIDs, based on its patented StorSwitch architecture, now in its 4th generation.

Today, all RAIDs are managed by a controller card with a shared bus accessible by only one drive at a time, giving rise to performance limitations due to arbitration latency.

3ware decided to remedy this problem by using instead a packetized SCSI-to-ATA switch RAID card connected to each HDD, each with its own data path, housing the switch and an onboard processor, chiefly for parity calculation.

“We lose no more than 2 to 3% in performance with a switch,” explained Egerton.

The company claims also that its switched ATA RAIDs outperform Ultra 160 disk array controllers.

To reduces cost on the new solution, the drives integrated are cheaper, higher capacity ATA units rather than SCSI or FC devices. The Escalade series 7201 PCI controller is used for 2 drives in RAID-0, -1 or JBOD. The 7500 will support from 4 to 12 HDDs, with additionally RAID-10 and -5 modes. The 8500 allows for the use of ATA or S-ATA disk drives, thanks to the addition of bridges.

3ware also proposes a subsystem, the RDC-400 ($259 retail), an internal drive expansion unit that supports four hot swap drives in a 5.25-inch form factor.

Prices for the PCI cards vary from $118 for 2 ports to $849 for 12 ports.

The entire solution was designed by 3ware, which explains the “3” in the company’s name (hardware, software, firmware).

The ASIC, a key component called P-chip, connects the PCI bus to the internal bus, routes all the data between the 2 using a packet switched fabric and manages the RAID functionality.

To service the individual drives, 3ware developed, under the name AccerATA, an automated data port to handle the asynchronous ATA disk drive interface.

Finally, the company implemented its driver architecture as a SCSI mini port driver under Windows or Linux.

“We produce 6,000 boards per month and our sales have grown by 20 to 30% per month,” Egerton notes.

For Europe, that currently translates to a good thousand per month.

All this can be traced back to Adaptec’s decision not to venture into iSCSI, a decision it later reversed, leading to the creation of start-up 3ware (as well as Alacritech).

Among the former Adaptec executives at 3ware, in addition to Egerton, are Faye Pairman, president and CEO, Barbara Murphy, VP marketing and Jim Schmidt, EVP engineering and CIO.

3ware numbers 56 employees, and has sales offices in Germany, Japan and Singapore.

The start-up is not planning to seek a buyer.

“We think we’ll be profitable by mid-2004, and thus be in a position to initiate an IPO,” Egerton concluded.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 183 on April 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Finally, there was no IPO and, in April 2009, LSI purchased AMCC 3ware RAID business for $20 million in cash.