connectivityZONE Products for the week of March 7, 2005

Broadcom Says…
Broadcom Announces the First SAS/SATA RAID-on-Chip Solution
Third Generation, Single-Chip RAID Platform Provides Enterprise-Class RAID Functionality for Volume Server/Workstation RAID-on-Motherboard Applications
Demonstration at IDF Delivers 1 Gigabyte per second Throughput with SAS

Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in wired and wireless broadband communications semiconductors, announced the industry's first SAS/SATA RAID-on-Chip (RoC) device targeted at volume server and workstation markets. This highly integrated, multi-functional RoC device provides the cost, space and power savings required to accelerate the transition of enterprise-class RAID technology to a RAID-on-Motherboard (RoMB) solution. As a result of its cost-effective, single-chip design, the new Broadcom RoC will increase RAID adoption on cost-sensitive server and workstation platforms.

Representing an important transition in disk drive interconnect technology, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is initially expected to start replacing SCSI in enterprise computing platforms in 2005, with wide adoption expected in 2006, according to a number of leading market research firms. A driving factor behind this transition is the parallel interconnect limitations associated with SCSI technology and its effect on design, performance and scalability. SAS is a serial interconnect technology that incorporates high-performance, point-to-point links that are easy to design, deploy and scale. SAS is also compatible with the lower cost SATA interconnect technology that enables system design flexibility and allows for tiered storage offerings that mix SAS and SATA drives. Broadcom is driving I/O convergence and replacing both SCSI and discrete SATA I/O technologies with its single-chip RoC solution.

Other trends driving the need for RAID-on-Chip devices are the increase in storage requirements and the move to lower capacity, small form factor (SFF) 2.5-inch drives, which increase drive densities in servers and workstations. As drive densities increase, the possibility of failure increases as drives are added in a system, placing greater emphasis on resiliency and data integrity requirements in the enterprise. RAID technology is designed to simultaneously increase both reliability and performance in multi-disk drive systems. With today's announcement, Broadcom is integrating both RAID and SAS/SATA protocol capabilities together in a single-chip design, enabling cost-sensitive multi-disk drive platforms to exploit the performance and convergence benefits that SAS and SATA offer, without compromising reliability as drive densities increase.

Announced today is the Broadcom BCM8603 RAID-on-Chip device that integrates several functions that previously existed only as discrete components. The new solution includes the following features:

In addition to the benefits of SAS/SATA convergence, the BCM8603 RoC also enables the transition from parallel PCI-X host interfaces to cost-effective, high-performance serial PCI Express host interfaces. To accommodate this transition, Broadcom has integrated support for both host bus architectures onto the BCM8603 RoC providing users with a choice of host interfaces based on their system I/O availability. Broadcom announced its first Gigabit Ethernet controller chip based on PCI Express in October 2003 and continues to be a leader in PCI Express I/O device shipments.

Additional enterprise-class RAID functionality is provided by Broadcom's highly portable and scalable XelCore RAID software. The software provides support for all popular RAID levels and incorporates such enterprise-class features as online capacity expansion, online RAID level migration, and the ability to create storage arrays that span multiple storage controllers without having to bring the system down.

"The BCM8603 RoC device enables system designers to design RAID technology with a cost-effective, single-chip solution that can be placed directly on the motherboard, making hardware-based RAID more widely available for cost-sensitive server and workstation platforms," said Tom Marmen, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Storage Line of Business. "Combined with our popular XelCore RAID software, the BCM8603 RoC represents a total storage solution, providing the industry's only single storage I/O device with built-in SAS, SATA-II, PCI Express and PCI-X."

"HP is driving industry adoption of SAS storage technology because of the enhanced performance capabilities it offers customers," said Javier Izquierdo, Director of Server Storage, HP. "Flexible SAS RoC devices, like Broadcom's BCM8603, help fill out the SAS ecosystem by providing a component with unique price/performance/feature characteristics that customers demand."

analogZONE Says . . .

When I reviewed Broadcom's BCM 5770 and the 5773 RAID controller on a Chip (RoC) devices back in November 2004 (a 2004 Product Of The Year award recipient), one of my only disappointments with the devices was their lack of support for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. While they are more expensive than their SATA brethren, the substantially increased performance and reliability they offer are more than worth it in many enterprise, carrier, and embedded applications. Obviously Broadcom feels the same way I do because SAS capability is one of the major additions in their latest RoC product, the BCM8603.

The BCM8603's SAS capabilities are evidence of Broadcom's aggressive march towards driving RAID 5 capabilities onto nearly every motherboard. The SATA II controller logic handles Native Command Queuing allows a drive to stack up commands and execute them without host attention. This, and the 3 Gbit/s speed data rates it supports make it an excellent and flexible system element for nearly any kind of storage system. The controller also adds optional PCI/X and PCI Express interfaces, and has the capacity to serve as an efficient bridge in applications where legacy PCI elements still linger (see Fig. 1).

"Dynamic Pricing:" Pay For What You Use

But there is more to the story than a simple upgrade of an already-capable chip. Broadcom has introduced a new concept, which they refer to as "Dynamic Pricing" that allows a board or box manufacturer to buy the highly-capable chip and pay for only the features they use on a particular product. In other words, depending what you pay for it, the chip can be enabled (via an internal license management scheme) to run in several modes:

The chip's PCI-X bridge can also be enabled or disabled on demand (for a fee), something that will be handy for both network-attached, and direct attached storage (See Fig. 2)

The flexible usage model upgrades can be implemented via an on-chip flash that manages a license key to enable or disable features. While mostly intended to be done during manufacture, it can also be done via software downloads in the field -- even from a web site.

To the best of my knowledge, this firmware-enabled feature set is a new strategy for the silicon industry. Many manufacturers make a single chip and create different "models" by enabling or disabling features using a series of bond-out schemes, but these are set at the time the device is placed in its package. Broadcom's approach is a fully software-enabled method of dispensing functionality on a pay-as-you-go basis, even after the chip is embedded within a product. Conceivably, a MIS manager could upgrade their storage box from RAID 1/0 to RAID 5 by purchasing a serial number-specific key from the manufacturer.

At first glance, "dynamic pricing" seems a little creepy -- something that somehow reminds me of Monsanto's strategy of selling both weed killers, and specially-designed herbicide-resistant seeds. But if handled properly the scheme could actually be a very viable new model for spreading out a mega-chip's development costs across far more sockets.

Obviously Broadcom is able to save lots of tooling costs by using the same die for a number of different "products." Hopefully we'll see the cost savings also translate into lower prices for its customers. But chip costs are only some of the savings that Broadcom hopes to create for its customers. Having a single part serve in multiple applications should also enable manufacturers to reduce the number of SKU codes and inventory lines they have to manage. It could for example allow them to design one HBA that can run in multiple applications, and even in multiple busses at a minimal extra cost. The savings in inventory, manufacturing, and qualification costs could be significant.

But even if you don't buy the "pay-as-you-grow" business model, the value that the BCM8603 offers should help accelerate the downward cost spiral that should bring SAS and SATA prices much closer and garner SAS a large chunk of the SCSI market over the next three years.

The BCM8603 and reference boards are available now to early access customers. Pricing for the fully-functional version will be $60 for 1-k piece lots.

Lee's Saltshaker Rating

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