i/oZONE Products for the week of July 19, 2004
Broadcom Says…
Full Strength Storage Solution At Half The Price --
Broadcom's Family of RAID Controllers Deliver RAID Performance at SATA Prices
By Completely Integrating Broadcom's SATA Technology from
Chip to Code, New RAID Host Bus Adapter Family Offers Highest Reliability,
Lowest Price/Performance and the Most Extensive and Robust SATA RAID Feature
Set
Broadcom Corporation is pleased to announce its RAIDCore BC4000 series RAID host bus adapter (HBA), delivering the industry's most reliable and highest performing Serial ATA (SATA) RAID controller currently available. Offering the industry's most extensive RAID feature set, the BC4000 RAID HBA is an excellent choice for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprise workgroups looking to improve data integrity and data access without the high costs usually associated with enterprise-class RAID functionality. Broadcom's new storage controllers are available through authorized Bell Microproducts' resellers and other major distributors worldwide.
Over the past few years, RAID controllers utilizing SCSI disk drives have been standard equipment within dedicated enterprise servers, used to achieve high speed data access while maintaining data integrity. However, through the recent use of Serial ATA technology, RAID controllers using SATA drives have performed comparably to their SCSI drive counterparts, but at much lower price points. The BC4000 HBA brings to market the industry's most extensive and robust RAID feature set for SATA-based applications, combining enterprise-class data integrity and data access performance at SMB price points.
The RAIDCore BC4000 line of SATA-based RAID HBAs is comprised of 64-bit, PCI-X low-profile (2U compatible) controller cards that offer four- or eight-drive support and are based on Broadcom's new BCM5770 Serial ATA controller chip. The new Broadcom BCM5770 SATA controller and the BC4000 board design significantly boost reliability with efficient power consumption and thermal load balancing, and results in a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive SATA RAID controllers.
Enterprise-class RAID functionality for the BC4000 controllers is provided by Broadcom's XelCore RAID software stack, based on the proprietary Fulcrum architecture (a highly integrated storage architecture). The XelCore software provides support for all popular RAID levels, as well as enterprise-class features such as online capacity expansion, controller spanning, online RAID level migration, and the ability to create storage arrays that span multiple controllers without having to bring the system down. As a result, Broadcom's RAID HBAs provide server and storage integrators with an inexpensive way to dramatically improve data integrity and data access speed without compromising data integrity or data access performance.
"The BC4000 HBA is a powerful storage solution that brings enterprise-class RAID technology to the SMB market," said Tom Marmen, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Storage Line of Business. "It is an ideal product for value-added resellers and storage integrators looking to offer high-end storage alternatives to their customers without the premium price of other RAID approaches. And because it is based on Broadcom technology, we can ensure a high level of quality and performance."
Industry Leading Performance
Delivering the industry's best SATA RAID performance, the BC4000 eight-channel
controller performs RAID0 sequential reads at over 460 megabytes per second
(MB/s) and sequential writes at more than 430 MB/s, as well as RAID5 sequential
reads exceeding 400 MB/s and sequential writes at over 280 MB/s, all of
which are performance leaders versus competitive products.
Furthermore, the BC4000's breakthrough performance is achieved by using the host PC's CPU for RAID processing without substantial impact on total system performance. Recently tested by an independent reviewer, Broadcom's four-channel controller peaked at lower than eight percent CPU utilization, which has little impact on the overall performance of today's powerful computing systems.
Extensive and Robust Feature Set
Utilizing XelCore RAID software based on Fulcrum architecture, Broadcom's
RAID solutions offer high-performance, enterprise-class RAID functionality.
These enterprise-class RAID features include:
Broadcom acquired the XelCore software and Fulcrum architecture in January
2004 as part of its acquisition of RAIDCore, Inc., enabling Broadcom to
offer a unique and complete set of RAID solutions to the server storage
market. Broadcom is one of few semiconductor providers that can offer enterprise-class
storage and data integrity to all levels of businesses, including SMBs,
who can now implement enterprise-level RAID features without the cost and
IT-intensive processes that have kept RAID from more widespread use. In
addition, the combination of Broadcom silicon, Fulcrum architecture and
XelCore software brings to market a set of enterprise-class RAID storage
solutions at a new price point to existing customers in the high volume
server and storage markets.
analogZONE Says . . .
Normally, I tend to focus on chip-level products, but I suspect that Broadcom's BC4452-H/4852-H SATA-based RAID controller boards will serve as a precursor to a reference design for a "RAID-on-motherboard" solution for servers, and attached storage systems. While the PCI-X board in this review slashes the cost of storage controllers, moving it onto the mother board will move RAID-based storage into the shelves of Fry's Best Buys, and other consumer electronics retailers already doing a brisk business in other networking gear. And it's about time. I don't know about you, but the proliferation of large, disk-hungry multimedia files has me thinking lustful thoughts about low-end RAID systems to reliably serve, and back up my own home office's data.
I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one in this situation, with many small and medium-sized businesses rapidly outgrowing their current storage solutions, and wanting some of the capacity, redundancy, and flexibility that the "big kids" enjoy with their corporate RAID clusters. That's why I think Broadcom has come up with a winning solution when it combined its BCM5770 SATA controller chip and XelCore software for a low-cost, high-performance RAID controller board. The upcoming generation of "right-sized" attached storage products make it easy to use clusters of inexpensive consumer-grade SATA-based (serial ATA) drives and still enjoy the reliability of striped, redundant data available with a RAID system.
Versatile Boards, Versatile Software
Since Broadcom's press release (above) does a good job outlining the board's
capabilities, I'll confine my remarks here to providing a little background
information, and pointing out some of their cooler features.
One thing that both system integrators and customers alike will appreciate is the board's scalability. They allow a SOHO or small business to get an entry-level RAID-5 system at SMB-appropriate pricing and then add disks for more storage on the fly. You can even change RAID levels without taking down the system. And in larger applications, they make a great foundation for creating distributed RAID storage for enterprise systems.
Broadcom also filled me in on a bunch of features not mentioned in the press release above. Among the more significant items is its flexible sparing capability that goes beyond global and dedicated spares and enables distributing the spare capacity of one drive across up to eight drives. While I'm not a storage expert, I agree with that Broadcom's assertion that this feature is important because it avoids the "silent death syndrome" -- a problem with RAID systems that rely on "cold", or inactive spares which can have problems that are undetected until the unit is needed.
I'll take their claims of a 3.5 million hour MTBF for the board with a grain of salt since I'm not sure how they managed to verify it, but I do appreciate the provisions for staggered drive spin-up. This avoids many small, but annoying potential power supply issues -- especially in larger disk arrays.
Thinking "Outside The Board"
There are also many great features in the IC and its driver software that
should interest folks thinking "outside the board" towards embedding
the controller chips and software in their own designs. The XelCore software's
flexibility allows small RAID implementations (up to 4 ports) to run the
directly on the host across any standard South Bridge chip. Besides freeing
up precious PCI-X bus bandwidth, this arrangement saves you the cost of
an HBA in a small RAID system, or SMB server. If you want to expand beyond
4 ports, you can use the spanning feature, and put in an HBA on the PCI-X
or PCI Express slot and span seamlessly between the existing drives and
the new ones. What more could you ask for?
Designers will also appreciate XelCore's software/hardware-independent application stack. This allows the same software to run as an application under a variety of OSs (Windows XP, 2K, 2003, plus multiple flavors of Linux), and even be ported down to a controller card without an RTOS without changing the command interface or functionality of the controller chip. You'll really appreciate this if you've got an existing product line you want to upgrade, or have a significant investment in a particular OS platform.
The controllers are already in international distribution channels with a suggested US list price of $362 for the BCM4852-H and $289 for the BCM4452-H.
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