AMCC Enters Mac Backup Arena

Giving Macintosh customers much-needed enterpriselike capabilities for their machines, Applied Micro Circuits Corp. unveiled new SATA II-based RAID and multicontent backup offerings at Macworld Expo.

At the San Francisco show last week, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company introduced its first Mac product—the 3ware Sidecar external RAID. Due next quarter, the Serial ATA II RAID-protected array is targeted at Apple Computer Inc.s Power Mac G5 Quad workstation. Capable of supporting up to 2TB, the 3ware Sidecar features a four-bay enclosure without drives, an external SATA multiline 4x connector cable, a PCI Express card and the seventh generation of AMCCs StorSwitch architecture for less than $1,000, officials said.

The new product is designed to satisfy large-file, high-performance and high-bandwidth applications such as video on demand, video production, video capture and audio production in wide usage among the Macintosh install base.

Users such as Stephen Burch, sound engineer for Maya Productions Ltd., of San Jose, Calif., say storage vendors have not addressed the increasingly complex storage needs of Mac customers. "I definitely feel [vendors are not doing enough]. There are solutions, but theyre so high-end youre spending thousands and thousands of dollars" for enterpriselike storage tools, Burch said.

Burch has been kicking the tires on AMCCs 3ware Sidecar external RAID offering in his production studio and so far is impressed with its backup and redundancy capabilities.

"As clients come in, sometimes Ill have 12-hour [recording] sessions, and you dont think always to back up or copy your data. Ive had cases sometimes at the end of the day where the hard drive just goes," said Burch. "With something like the [AMCC] Sidecar, not only do I get [improved] throughput, but if Im recording and a drive fails, I dont lose any data, so it saves my time and clients time and definitely saves a lot of money."