3ware Information & 3ware Links at HealthHaven.com

3ware 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 and became a AMCC product line brand (manufacturing RAID controllers for Serial Attached SCSI, Serial ATA, and Parallel ATA devices). 3ware (also referred to as "AMCC Storage") was a product brand name of AMCC storage offering, and the product line was managed by Russell Johnson.

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.

AMCC / 3ware's differentiation from competitive offerings was its own proprietary I/O processor, trademarked as StorSwitch. The technology 3ware applied to scale performance was well known in the networking world: packet switching. AMCC / 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. The combination of high streaming performance with very low cost per byte data storage was compelling in many applications.

Prior to the acquisition by AMCC, 3ware marketed its products under the brand name "Escalade." Following the acquisition, 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.

On April 6, 2009, LSI Corporation announced an agreement to acquire the 3ware RAID adapter business of Applied Micro Circuits Corporation.

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