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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.