Vendor information

3Ware (​http://www.3ware.com) card are usually well supported on Linux.
Theses cards are often considered as some of the bests hardware RAID controllers for GNU/Linux or BSD systems.
3Ware supports Linux and provide an opensource kernel driver which is part of Linux since ages.

Linux kernel drivers

There is two drivers for 3ware cards:

Driver	Supported cards
3w_xxxx	3Ware Eskalad 7000 and 8000 series
3w_9xxx	3Ware Eskaled 9000 series

You should not expect any problems with theses drivers which are known to be mature and stable.
We don't know any current Linux distrubtion which miss theses drivers so no additional step should be required to get it working.

Management and reporting tools

It currently exists no opensource tools for the 3Ware cards. However, 3Ware provides two proprietary utilities for x86 and x86_64 linux systems.

tw_cli

tw_cli is a command line tool to manage and monitore Eskaled cards. It works fine with 7000 and 8000 cards, as well as with the 9000 series.

3dm2

3DM2 is a Web applications with an embedded web servers that allow use to do the same things than with tw_cli but graphical. It's works fine and doesn't rely on insane dependencies like java, tomcat or something else.