Features - Storage Innovations:

BROADCOM ANNOUNCES IMPROVES RAID THROUGH DISTRIBUTED SPARING

Broadcom Corp, a provider of highly integrated semiconductor solutions enabling broadband communications, announced distributed sparing capabilities for its RAIDCore line of host bus adapter (HBA) RAID controllers. Distributed sparing reduces the impact of problems that can result when a disk drive failure occurs by fully utilizing all of the storage drives in a RAID-configured system. Fundamentally, it provides more effective use of the disk space while improving the performance of storage arrays.

Unlike simple "hot sparing" capabilities that only provide one extra, single disk drive for immediate redundant service in the case of a drive failure, distributed sparing shares the hot sparing task among all drives in the RAID subsystem. This provides a marked increase in performance since the number of drives available for data storage and retrieval is increased. Distributed sparing is one of many advanced features available with Broadcom RAIDCore controllers utilizing the company's XelCore software.

The XelCore RAID software stack is based upon Broadcom's proprietary Fulcrum architecture, a highly integrated storage subsystem with integrated cache management that provides virtualization at any of the popular RAID levels, operating system independence, and hardware implementation flexibility for Broadcom's RAID products. The XelCore software delivers online capacity expansion, online RAID-level migration, controller spanning and the ability to create arrays that span multiple controllers, all without having to bring the system down. The XelCore software is part of Broadcom's overall storage family product line, which includes a full enterprise-class RAID software stack, Fibre Channel SAN switches, home and SMB NASoC (network attached storage system-on-a-chip) solutions, Serial ATA storage I/O chipsets and RAIDCore host bus adapters.

"Through distributed sparing, Broadcom enables businesses to fully use all of the drives in an array, offering a solid, high-performance alternative to hot sparing," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst with Enterprise Storage Group. "It is our expectation that Broadcom's distributed sparing feature will provide the same level of redundant protection comparable to hot sparing, but at a lower cost."

Broadcom's distributed sparing also ensures that all of the disks on the RAID controller are in use so that a drive cannot silently fail. With the traditional dedicated hot spare technique used by other controllers, if the standby disk goes bad without the RAID subsystem being aware of a failure, the user may be left vulnerable for an extended period of time without redundancy should one of the other drives in the array fail. By incorporating distributed sparing within RAIDCore HBA controllers, the hard disk storage investment is maximized while high data integrity is maintained.

"Competitive sparing solutions typically require customers to purchase a separate disk drive to be used only as an emergency backup drive, resulting in a larger storage investment. With our distributed sparing technology, all of the drives in an array can be used, providing our customers with complete utilization of their storage investment without any hidden or additional costs," said Tom Marmen, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Storage Line of Business.

Broadcom acquired the XelCore software stack and Fulcrum architecture in January 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, the Fulcrum architecture and XelCore software brings to market a set of enterprise-class RAID storage solutions to existing customers in the high volume server and storage markets.