Markets
The potential markets for 3ware’s TwinStor technology are extremely wide-ranging and should be receptive to improvements
in performance and reliability. In the home market where cost is extremely important, the TwinStor technology will be
important because many users lack the expertise and tools to back up data regularly or to recover the operating system,
applications, and data after a failure. This safeguard, coupled with the ability to “future-proof” the system, may be attractive
to a large portion of the home market
The "SOHO" (small office, home office) market is a natural utilization of TwinStor technology. A disk failure could destroy
valuable records and close a small business until the system is recovered. Even if the business never has a disk failure, the
peace of mind and increased performance would justify the cost of the second drive and switch.
3ware’s TwinStor technology is especially strong in applications which are read intensive and which have a mix of small and
large object sizes, the typical transactions performed by a Web server. Systems with the TwinStor technology can be
effective in the Web hosting environment and will often show better overall performance than any other way of utilizing a
second drive, with the added bonus of fault tolerance.
On-line transaction processing (OLTP) is another area where systems utilizing TwinStor technology will benefit. In the past,
OLTP transaction sizes have been very small, with records of just a few hundred bytes, but the trend is definitely towards
richer transactions with image, video and audio content. For small, large, or mixed transactions, TwinStor technology
provides a good solution at an extremely low cost per transaction. Applications may range from point-of-sale controllers to
back-end database systems.
High streaming rates are required in systems that process real-time video and audio. 3ware’s TwinStor technology provides
this streaming bandwidth and the backup to prevent loss of data when a disk fails. The combination of these requirements
makes the TwinStor technology a good fit for a variety of applications.
Conclusion
3ware’sTwinStor technology provides a fault-tolerant solution that protects valuable data and improves read performance.
This benefits a wide range of computer systems including home PCs, small business systems, on-line transaction point-of-
sale controllers, and streaming real-time audio/video processing platforms. The redundancy of data replaces other more
costly data backup solutions and eliminates the dilemma that often arises when a drive failure occurs prior to the archival of
irreplaceable data.
Given these benefits of data protection and performance enhancement, we are likely to see an increase in the deployment of
multiple drive computer systems that make use of TwinStor technology.
