Broadcom offers full hand with serial-attached SCSI RAID on PCI Express cards

This overview was lifted from the Product Briefing sheet Broadcom is handing out at Storage Expo

The Broadcom RAIDCore BC5000 and BC5500 families of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Host Bus Adapters are Broadcom's third generation of RAID products offering consumers an unmatched combination of storage performance, feature richness, reliability, and consumer value, making it the ideal solution for enterprise and commercial RAID applications. These benefits stem from Broadcom's unparalleled integration levels, a newly integrated high-performance processor (8C5500 Family), advanced high-speed SerDes technology, proven PCI Express technology, and a rich software feature set.

Performance and Flexibility
Both the BC5000 and BC5500 fully support the latest 3 Gbps Serial Attached SCSI and 3 Gbps Serial ATA-II (SATA II) hard disk drives as well as earlier generation SATA drives, giving customers a single architecture to flexibly incorporate and mix a variety of disk technologies within a single platform to meet a range of price/ performance objectives.

Proven High-Speed Serial Technology
The exceptional signal integrity of this family greatly reduces the risk for customers connecting to new 3G drives and deploying storage in the quickly emerging PCI Express server market. By leveraging their proven high-speed serial capability and the same PCI Express technology found in Broadcom's successful Gigabit Ethernet controllers and server chipsets, Broadcom provides a product that customers can confidently deploy in their systems.

Hardware and Software RAID Support
The RAIDCore 8C5500 integrates a high performance processor for hardware RAID support, allowing servers to focus virtually all of their CPU cycles on the customer's application. When the application is storage, the RAIDCore BC5000 with software RAID support allows the application to fully leverage the performance of the server processor to offer the ultimate in storage performance.

Integration
All major storage blocks are integrated into a single ASIC on the 8C5500 and 8C5000 HBAs, providing a competitive advantage over many other HBAs using multichip solutions. Broadcom's unmatched integration reduces system power consumption and heat dissipation requirements, increases product reliability in terms of MTBF, and increases performance, all critical elements in enterprise storage applications.

Reliability and Data Integrity
Key to any RAID architecture is reliability and data integrity, and the BC5000 and 8C5500 families are in a class of their own. Full support of RAID levels 0, l, 10, I n, 10n, 5, 50 ensures that customers have full data integrity, while still maintaining price/performance targets. A patent pending test process ensures that software drivers have the highest quality, guaranteeing a positive user experience. Comprehensive interoperability testing assures that the card works with the most common drives and motherboards in the industry. Features such as S.M.A.R.T. drive monitoring, background array checking, and dynamic sector repair all ensure that the array remains healthy. Finally, if a problem is found, automatic e-mail notification and highlighting of problems on the GUI to administrators enables quick problem resolution.

Feature Richness
The BC5000 and BC5500 both leverage the latest generation of Broadcom's feature-rich and innovative XelCore RAID software, providing enterprise-class RAID features including RAID5, RAID50, distributed sparing and online capacity expansion. XelCore features have been expanded to support greater reliability and performance, remote management, a powerful graphical user interface, and many other new and improved features.

Broad Application Support
The superior performance and rich feature set of the Broadcom RAID products makes it ideal for a variety of applications including servers, network attached storage (NAS), backups, gaming, video editing and video on demand, supercomputing, and CCTV surveillance.