3Ware Banks On Serial ATA

Joseph Keith's first encounter with 3Ware came back in 2000 when he was attending LinuxWorld as an employee of True Solutions, a server OEM. Standing near his booth on the show floor, Keith says he recalls one of 3Ware's staffers "dragging" him excitedly over to the company's booth for a demonstration of its IDE RAID controller.

"I have to say, I was pretty impressed by the technology," says Keith, who today serves as director of business development at ProMicro Systems, a San Diego-based systems integrator.

Based on that demo, Keith went on to incorporate 3Ware's controller into a solution designed for a customer that needed to store a significant number of video files cheaply. At ProMicro Systems, he has continued his relationship with 3Ware, which is now making a name selling IDE RAID controllers for Serial ATA drives.

3Ware's Escalade 8500 Series Serial ATA controller includes a model, the 8500-12, that boasts the highest port count in the industry: 12. The company also ships versions that sport two, four and eight ports. Armed with such a high number of ports on a single controller, 3Ware officials say that systems builders can put smaller, low-cost Serial ATA drives into a device, upping overall scalability and performance. The Escalade controller uses a nonblocking switched-fabric architecture called StorSwitch, described as similar to that of Ethernet, to communicate and manage each drive. Individually, ATA drives perform below that of standard SCSI or Fibre Channel solutions, but when aggregated via the controller and switch, they can read and write in unison for performance closer to their enterprise-grade cousins via a low-latency data path. And they do so at a much lower price tag.

"White-box integrators can create a market for themselves by getting a Microsoft [Server Appliance Kit], a low-cost chassis and a 3Ware controller attached to 12 Serial ATA drives, and build a system for less than $10,000," says Scott Cleland, technical marketing executive at 3Ware, Sunnyvale, Calif. A single version of the 8500-12 controller can incorporate more than 2 TB of storage, he adds.

Keith echoes the buzz around price/performance benefits. He says that by using the 3Ware con-troller, ProMicro Systems has crafted a 10U server with 32 160-GB drives and 5 TB of data for less than $20,000. "With this faster bus on Serial ATA, you can still have the cost-attractiveness of IDE with near-SCSI performance for a third of the price," he says.

It's no wonder that Serial ATA technology has been knighted successor to traditional Parallel ATA drives as the primary low-cost RAID solution. Drive giants, such as Seagate and Maxtor, are shipping products; other players in the Serial ATA RAID controller space include Adaptec, which ships a two-port version, and Intel, which has two- and four-port varieties. Meanwhile, research firm Gartner predicts that by the end of 2005, 98 percent of ATA drive shipments will sport a Serial ATA interface.

3Ware's flagship 8500-12 controller, in particular, appeals to the market for near-line storage, which Cleland characterizes as data that requires always-online status but only changes periodically. Applications that generate near-line storage include satellite-image capture, medical imaging, video-on-demand application servers, and security video and audio capture. By comparison, data that changes constantly and is highly transactional is typically handled by more expensive SCSI or Fibre Channel solutions.

Unlike Parallel ATA, Serial ATA sports a point-to-point cabling design, which eliminates the shared-bus bottlenecks that occur with the parallel design, Cleland says. Serial ATA cables are also more flexible, enabling easier routing and better cooling in boxes with large numbers of drives.

Systems builders are seeing a big push for the new interface.

"We're seeing a real trend around Serial ATA, particularly as manufacturers like Intel put it right on the motherboard," says Charles Babb, vice president of systems builder Avnet Applied Computing, Scottsdale, Ariz. "There's a lot more demand from ISVs and OEMs."