SiliconStor Signs On for SATA

With little fanfare or funding, Milpitas, Calif.-based SiliconStor has earned a small place at the increasingly crowded SATA table (see Survey: SATA, IP SANs Hot Priorities and IDC: Storage Looking Chipper). The startup's counting on its technology to gain more widespread acceptance.

SiliconStor was founded in October 2002 but has issued hardly a peep until this week, when the company announced an "active-active" multiplexer chip and an OEM deal with Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL).

We’ve been quiet since late 2002,” says CEO Mike Ofstedahl. “But we’ve been helped out by the invasion of SATA in the enterprise.”

Ofstedahl isn’t making that much noise yet. He won’t disclose the size of the company or where its funding has come from. He will say SiliconStor is working on raising venture capital and hopes to close a funding round by the first quarter of 2005. By then, Ofstedahl also expects to ship a second-generation chip that supports SAS and SATA.

Besides Ofstedahl, SiliconStor's executive roster includes board chairman Petro Estakhir, founder and CTO of Lexar Media, who worked on ATA systems at Cirrus Logic Inc. (Nasdaq: CRUS) and was among the founders of SiliconStor.SiliconStor’s first chip enables disk array manufacturers to make single-port SATA drives look like dual-port drives, doubling bandwidth. Competing active/passive multiplexers from vendors such as Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: VTSS) and PMC-Sierra Inc. (Nasdaq: PMCS)require a path controller card that sits between the drive and array midplane and siphons bandwidth.

Dot Hill is implementing SiliconStor’s chip in its SANnet II SATA systems that Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) sells, and Ofstedahl says he is talking to other subsystem vendors about OEM deals (see Dot Hill Unveils SATA Solutions).

“We’re talking to all the array companies. Their reaction is, ‘Where were you a year ago?’ ”

Is SiliconStor really a year late to the party? Plenty of vendors are already shipping SATA drives, and the market is no longer wide open. SilconStor’s partner Dot Hill took a hit last quarter when its SATA systems got off to a slow start for Sun, which has dropped the price substantially to try and pick up sales.

Still, IDC's director of storage research, Dave Reinsel, says there is plenty of market opportunity ahead for the right SATA chip companies. IDC says ATA makes up 10 percent of the external enterprise drives and from 15 to 20 percent of the TBytes shipped this past year. Reinsel forecasts those numbers will rise to 40 percent of the drives and more than 50 percent of TBytes shipped in 2005.Reinsel says SiliconStor’s prospects depend on whether OEMs want to pump up performance of SATA drives or continue to use them as cheap high-capacity storage.

“The product is great for enabling SATA to crawl up the food chain a bit,” Reinsel says of SiliconStor’s chip. “It depends on how the systems vendors want to deploy SATA -- if they want to enable high performance or just be a low-cost drive.”

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch