SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 22 -- Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2005 -- Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in wired and wireless broadband communications semiconductors, today announced the demonstration of the industry's first SAS/SATA RAID-on-Chip (RoC) device, with integrated PCI Express® (PCIe) host bus architecture support, at IDF this week. The demonstration highlights Broadcom's third generation RAID technology and features the capability of using either SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) or SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drive formats to best match the customer's RAID storage requirements. The PCI Express SAS/SATA RoC solution demonstration at IDF showcases the lowest power PCIe SAS/SATA RAID solution in the industry, as well as the highest usage and system design flexibility, driven by an advanced enterprise-class RAID software stack.
Representing an important transition in disk drive interconnect technology, SAS is expected to be widely adopted as a replacement to SCSI in enterprise computing platforms beginning early 2006. SAS represents significant performance, integration, reliability and serviceability advantages over SCSI, and is currently being shipped by leading server OEMs. Since the SAS infrastructure is compatible with lower cost SATA drive technology, the Broadcom® RoC demonstration at IDF illustrates system design flexibility allowing for tiered storage offerings that mix SAS high-performance drives and SATA low-cost drives within the same storage network.
The SAS and SATA-based RoC demonstration includes next generation PCI Express technology. PCI Express provides a standards-based, serial high-speed, point-to-point host bus architecture that enables significant performance and system integration advantages over older PCI-X® parallel bus architectures. Broadcom previously addressed the demand for PCI Express network solutions by creating the industry's first line of PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers in the Fall of 2003 and continues to ship multiple families of PCIe devices in a variety of wired and wireless controller solutions.
For system designers and integrators, the PCI Express SAS/SATA RAID solution demonstration at IDF shows significant space and power/thermal reductions as a direct benefit of the highly integrated RoC architecture. By eliminating multiple devices, Broadcom's single-chip integration, coupled with superior I/O design, enables the design of smaller solutions that lower thermal and power requirements (expected to be less than 50% of existing solutions). The lower heat and corresponding reduced power dissipation allows systems integrators to lower their costs by building less expensive storage equipment without the need for fans or additional external components that can drive up bill-of-materials costs. The trend towards smaller and thinner servers will be further accelerated with this capability.
XelCore(TM) (Broadcom's highly portable enterprise-class RAID software stack) enables the highest level of usage flexibility by having the unique ability to run in either "Software RAID" mode (on the system host processor) or "Hardware RAID" mode (in the embedded RoC processor). System designers now have a choice of designing high performance, highly scalable storage systems using the "Software RAID" capability, or opt for the "Hardware RAID" mode to develop server systems with high storage offload and reliability. The XelCore RAID stack provides support for all popular RAID levels and includes 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 take the system offline.
"By providing SAS, SATA and PCI Express capabilities all on a single chip, Broadcom is raising the standard requirement for enterprise RAID storage," said Tom Marmen, Vice President & General Manager of Broadcom's Storage Line of Business. "Having all of this functionality supported by a single RAID software stack allows for the greatest design flexibility and performance while consuming far less power than other RAID controller card solutions."
Broadcom's PCI Express SAS/SATA RAID-on-Chip demonstration occurs this week at IDF in Broadcom's Booth #819.
About Broadcom
Broadcom Corporation is a global leader in wired and wireless broadband communications semiconductors. Our products enable the convergence of high-speed data, high definition video, voice and audio at home, in the office and on the go. Broadcom provides manufacturers of computing and networking equipment, digital entertainment and broadband access products, and mobile devices with the industry's broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art system-on-a-chip and software solutions. These solutions support our core mission: Connecting everything®.
Broadcom is one of the world's largest fabless semiconductor companies, with annual revenue of more than $2 billion. The company is headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. Broadcom may be contacted at 1-949-450-8700 or at www.broadcom.com.
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