Jim McDonald and J. Peter Herz founded 3Ware in February 1997 to develop the DiskSwitch Architecture, which employs packet switching and inexpensive ATA drivers to enable high performance, low cost storage subsystems. 3ware raised first round funding of $2 million in July 1998 from New Enterprise Associates, Selby Venture Partners, and private investors. In July ’99, 3ware raised $12 million in 2nd round funding from lead investor VantagePoint Venture Partners, and the first-round investors. No additional capital requirements are anticipated at this time. The company has about 35 employees.

Although the performance and capacity of disk drives has improved, technologies that connect drives to computers have lagged. Existing high performance interfaces like SCSI and FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) have focused on bandwidth, however 3ware believes that latency is the true performance bottleneck. 3ware invented the DiskSwitch Architecture to tackle latency and performance problems while bringing enterprise class storage solutions to new price points and markets.

The DiskSwitch Architecture employs packet switching to give each disk drive fully dedicated low latency bandwidth to the PC’s memory. Drive throughput is aggregated through 3ware’s packet switching controller, which speeds data into system memory using only a fraction of the host CPU and eliminates shared bus arbitration delays typical of SCSI architectures. The DiskSwitch Architecture also uses inexpensive ATA drives in place of SCSI drives, significantly reducing the cost of storage subsystems.

DiskSwitch storage controllers raise the performance of ATA drives to SCSI levels using 3ware’s AccelerATA Data Channel technology. A dedicated “AccelerATA” data channel is connected to each drive. All AccelerATA channels are connected to a high-speed packet-switching controller that transports data from individual drives to the host computer through 3ware’s high-speed bus. Each data transfer is treated by the controller as a transaction, with the on-board processor serving only as arbitrator and monitor, offloading the PC’s CPU and the PCI bus.

Each disk drive has fully dedicated bandwidth, eliminating bus arbitration delays and other limitations of shared-bus architectures. Low-cost ultraATA drives can be used in place of SCSI drives with no performance penalty. A packet-switched bus is also ideal for implementing popular RAID configurations for servers: striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1) and parity (RAID 5). The combination of low-latency individual data channels and packet-switching allows the DiskSwitch Architecture to scale as well. The DiskSwitch controller comes with the DiskSwitch Manager utility, which permits local and remote configuration and monitoring via any web browser.

DiskSwitch controllers are extremely effective in improving system response time and data throughput in demanding applications such as CAD, multi-media content creation, software engineering, and video editing. The DiskSwitch family of PCI-based controller boards consists of the DiskSwitch 4W, 2S, 4S and 8S for Windows NT workstations, small servers, and mid-range servers and support 4, 4 and 8 drives respectively. Device drivers are available for Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Server. Novell, Linux and SCO drivers will be introduced in the future. The Controller prices range from $349 to $895 @ 1Ku. The initial products are targeted at OEMs of desktop and server systems. Additional products, to be introduced later this year, will be targeted at the VAR channel. The DiskSwitch 4W is shipping. The DiskSwitch 2S and 4S will ship soon.

The workstation/high end PC market size is approx. 2 million units per year. The targeted server market size is also about 2 million units. Adaptec is the primary competitor. However the DiskSwitch architecture has many unique attributes as described above. It enables high-speed streaming and transactional data rates on all RAID configurations and uses standard ATA drives, which are presented to the OS as SCSI drives. Partners include Palo Alto Products Int’l. The company is currently focusing on board level products but will consider delivering its IP in many forms as time progresses.

John R. "Beau" Vrolyk, president and CEO

J. Peter Herz, Sr. VP of business development, co-founder (formerly director of North American applications for Siemens Semiconductor)

Jim McDonald, CTO and co-founder (formerly ran a consulting engineering business, with clients including Siemens Micro, Belfort Memory, NEC, Seagate and 3M)

Dr. Robert Horst, VP of research (formerly a technical director at Tandem and a founder of Tandem Labs)

Kun Yim, VP of manufacturing (formerly dir. of operations at Evans & Sutherland)

Chris Christides, Sr. VP of sales