Sierra Logic Ships SATA

The investors who poured $32.5 million into Sierra Logic Inc. from 2001 to 2003 bet heavily that low-cost SATA drives would make it big in storage (see Sierra Logic Secures $12M). Thats not much of a gamble today as nearly all the major storage vendors are shipping SATA systems.

Sierra Logic's challenge now will be to stand out in the crowd that's forming around SATA technology. The Roseville, Calif.-based startup appears to be off to a good start with two announced OEM deals for its first product (see Sierra Logic Ships Storage Router).

Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL) and Xyratex Ltd. (Nasdaq: XRTX) are starting to ship the product Sierra Logic calls a Silicon Storage Router. The router is actually a chip that sits between SATA drives and a RAID controller and provides Fibre Channel features such as scaleable routing and full-path redundancy.

Dot Hill uses Sierra Logic’s routers in the SANnet II storage systems that Sun rebrands as its StorEdge 3511 low-end SAN systems (see BT Boasts of Compliance). Xyratex ships Sierra Logic’s router in its FC-SATA expansion JBOD system (see Xyratex Ships SATA Expansion).

Sierra Logic CEO Bob Whitson says four more OEM deals are in the works with system vendors, and he expects $7 million in revenue this quarter. Whitson forecasts Sierra Logic will turn a profit by the middle of 2005.“We have plenty of money in the bank and we're skating toward break even,” Whitson says.

Sierra Logic will soon face competition, as there’s no shortage of chip makers dabbling in SATA. Ario Data Networks and Marvell Technology Group Ltd. are believed to be close to shipping a competing product (see SATA Startup Ario Nets $17M). Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) (Nasdaq: AMCC), Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq: BRCM), PMC-Sierra Inc. (Nasdaq: PMCS),and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: VTSS) are also involved with SATA products.

"Customers want what they bring to market," Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. financial anaylst Daniel Renouard says of Sierra Logic. "But there's a lot between here and where they need to go as a startup."

Sierra Logic's chip is designed to make SATA drives reliable enough to be used for primary storage for all but the most critical data.

“The only thing that’s missing is the drive doesn’t spin as fast and it’s not as good as Fibre Channel for transactional applications,” Whitson says of SATA.Nobody has to tell the Sierra Logic folks about the benefits of Fibre Channel. Whitson and the other Sierra founders -- CTO Joe Steinmetz, engineering VP Margie Evashenk, and sales and marketing VP Bryan Cowger -- were part of Agilent Technologies Inc.'s (NYSE: A) Tachyon Fibre Channel Controller team before starting Sierra Logic.

"We’re experts in making disk drives work in enterprises,” Whitson says.

Now they’re working on a 4-Gbit/s product (the current router supports 2-Gig FC and 1.5-Gig SATA), and considering 8-Gig routers and serial attached SCSI (SAS) controllers. After that, Whitson says Sierra Logic will have a second product family that chases the emerging PCI Express market.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch