3ware’s RAID Controllers Best the Competition

3ware has unveiled new Serial ATA (SATA) RAID controllers that the company claims outperform competing products from LSI Logic and Adaptec by 100-150%.

3ware Escalade 9000 RAID Controllers

The new Escalade 9000 Series hardware RAID controllers outperform LSI and Adaptec by 150% in RAID 5 sequential reads and 100% in RAID 5 sequential writes, according to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.

“The performance numbers are very impressive, and can make a substantial difference in applications performance such as video streaming,” says Tony Asaro of the Enterprise Storage Group Lab. “Application performance will vary depending on the I/O workloads — it is an inexact science with lots of variables. But the numbers are good.”

The controllers, based on the company’s StorSwitch switched RAID architecture, provide up to 3.6TB of fault tolerant storage per controller and deliver more than 400Mb/s sequential RAID 5 reads and 110Mb/s RAID 5 sequential writes, according to 3ware.

3ware marketing VP Barbara Murphy says the company’s controllers are “enabling Serial ATA to become a true enterprise-class solution.”

The company says its hardware RAID architecture features an on-board processor and an integrated RAID ASIC that offloads RAID controller functions from the host CPU, dedicating the server processing to its core applications to enhance overall system performance. 3ware claims it has the only offering combining affordable SATA drives with technology addressing the entire RAID spectrum of capacity, feature-set, and performance.

The Escalade 9000 Series controllers offer advanced RAID features and remote management software for data protection and system configuration and management. Designed to support 64-bit computing applications, the controllers support single arrays of up to 3.6TB through 64-bit LBA addressability on one controller and more than 12TB on a single server.

Applications that will benefit most from the controllers include NAS storage, web servers, cluster servers, supercomputing, near-line backup and archival, security systems, and streaming applications for audio and video servers, according to the company.

The controllers are compatible with Windows 2003, XP, and 2000; Red Hat Linux; SuSE Linux; and FreeBSD operating systems. They are currently shipping to OEMs, VARs, and system integrators, and will be available in 12-, 8-, and 4-port configurations early in the second quarter.

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