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Top Women in Storage: Page 9 of 17

At AMCC, Murphy appears to have come into her own. In addition to raising revenues in spite of bleak surroundings, she's led AMCC's development of a SAS RAID controller that is scheduled for release October 1. That product, which is geared for networked disk arrays, will ship by the end of this fiscal quarter and is now in evaluation at two "major" but unnamed OEMs.

It was a rocky road. AMCC is late out of the gate with SAS because it waited for partner Marvell to produce the chips needed for the controller. When progress was too slow, Murphy's group turned to Emulex and cut a second deal to get the chips it needed. Emulex remains in place for AMCC's controller, though Marvell subsequently decided to move forward with SAS. "Largely, I hope we had some degree of influence on them," Murphy says.

Murphy is determined to keep in the thick of the storage fray. She's focused on the design issues of RAID acceleration, fault tolerance, data protection, video storage, Ethernet SANs, email management, Web caching, and other current problems of data management, and she moves from one to another with a sharp coherence and confidence in her products and people.

Some trends she questions: "People want to add virtualization at the switch or box level, but you need to put it as far up the food chain as possible," she says. "Virtualization at my level is insane, quite honestly. The promise of virtualization is phenomenal, but the reason we're having to look at virtualization is that we're living in a file-based world designed by our friends in Redmond many years ago." Object-based storage, she notes, would be simpler to manage.

Murphy's opinions and choices are important, because the future of her division may well determine the fate of AMCC, which like other component suppliers faces the choice to throw its weight behind storage or flee the segment for good.