AMCC Conquers RAID 6 Write Performance Penalty With Its Newly Announced 3ware 9650SE SATA II RAID Controller: Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) will demonstrate high performance and high capacity SATA II RAID solutions for HPC platforms beginning today at the 2006 Supercomputing Conference. The premier event for high performance computing takes place in Tampa from November 13-16. Visitors will see demonstrations based on AMCC’s flagship hardware RAID controller, the 3ware 9650SE, in booth #438. Rackable Systems, a leading provider of servers and storage for large-scale data centers, leverages AMCC’s advanced RAID technology to deliver high performance and reliability in its storage systems. “AMCC’s 3ware controllers have a long history of providing high-performance, high-capacity RAID for supercomputing environments,” said Geoffrey Noer, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Rackable Systems. “We rely on AMCC’s 3ware line to achieve high performance and scalability for our customers’ most data-intensive applications.” 3ware 9650SE SATA II Controllers Accelerate RAID 6 Performance AMCC will demonstrate its industry leading technology in a RAID 6 performance shootout pitting 8-port versions of AMCC’s 3ware 9650SE against a competing SATA II RAID controller. The SATA controllers will attach to 7200rpm Seagate 750GB drives and will be running multi-stream heavy workloads to simulate real world application environments. The performance shootout will display the industry’s most compelling combination of RAID 6 performance and reliability. AMCC’s breakthrough simultaneous double parity XOR RAID 6 algorithm generates fewer memory interrupts and maximizes throughput by mitigating the RAID 6 write penalty inherent to RAID 6 operations. These architectural advances enable the 9650SE to deliver more than double the performance of competing offerings. “The results of our RAID 6 competitive shootout emphasize our clear cut commitment to provide powerful, performance-minded SATA II RAID controllers for high performance computing systems,” said Scott Cleland, director of marketing, AMCC Storage. “While 3ware controllers continue to lead the market in RAID 5 performance, the 3ware 9650SE outshines the competition as the new standard bearer for RAID 6 performance.” AMCC’s high-density scalability demonstration will include an Advanced Industrial Computer, Inc. (AIC) 24TB SATA II storage system featuring three 16-port 3ware 9650SE controllers and 48 500GB SATA II disk drives from Hitachi Data Systems. The system sustains over 1.9 GB/s of RAID 6 reads and over 1.8 GB/s of RAID 6 writes spotlighting AMCC’s scalability and leading-edge performance bandwidth. Targeted toward enterprise-level administrators, network designers, and high performance computing users, the 3ware 9650SE family represents the broadest line of PCI Express-to-SATA II RAID controllers on the market. The 3ware 9650SE is currently available through AMCC’s worldwide network of distributors, integrators, and VARs. MSRP starts at $195 for the 2-port configuration, and ranges to $995 for the 16-port model. A 24-port model will be introduced during the first quarter of 2007.