Broadcom RAIDs SMB Storage Market

Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq: BRCM) is ready to roll out its first RAID adapter products, and in the process it may have found a market it never expected.

Broadcom next week will announce four- and eight-port RAID host-bus adapters (HBAs) based on the SATA controller chip and software acquired when it purchased RaidCore in Feburary (see Broadcom Raids SATA Startup). The company say's it's pursuing the SMB market because it considers it underserved.

"There are no 800-pound gorillas selling RAID solutions into that market, says Mark Taylor, Broadcom’s director of RAID marketing. “We see it open to dominate.”

Broadcom might eventually launch RAID-on-a-chip (ROC) and RAID-on-a-motherboard (ROM) products, but in the meantime it's focused on getting its foot in the door of the RAID adapter market. The current field includes Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT), LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE: LSI), Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) (Nasdaq: AMCC), and startup Promise Technology Inc. (See Motherboard Makers Pick Adaptec , HP Opens Patent Division, AMCC Ships New SATA , LSI Logic Unveils Software, SAS HBAs, and LSI Logic Takes Control of SATA.)

Broadcom is taking a different technological approach from the others. Instead of offloading TCP/IP processing from the servers, Broadcom’s software uses the server’s CPU for RAID processing. Broadcom claims its eight-channel SATA-based HBA can perform RAID sequential reads at over 460 Mbyte/s and sequential writes at more than 430 Mbyte/s, and RAID 5 sequential reads at more than 400 Mbyte/s and sequential writes at more than 280 Mbyte/s. Broadcom prices the four-port controller at $289 and the eight-port version at $365.Taylor, who came from RaidCore, says VARs and integrators have found a way to use RaidCore’s first SATA controller in a way the startup never foresaw (see RaidCore Debuts Serial ATA RAID). They combine the controllers with a NIC card to create cheap, iSCSI-based storage networks. He expects the next adapters will be used the same way. "That draws us into an area we hadn’t thought we would go. We thought it would be connected to servers and direct-attached storage.”

But using the product in network storage may also expose a flaw in Broadcom’s product: poor management features. The software isn’t SMI-S compatible, and Broadcom hasn’t yet delivered a Web-based management application.

"I have concerns about its manageability,” says Illuminata Inc. analyst David Freund. “Right now it’s a closed system. They have to build reasonable tools and pay attention to SMI-S and the API set used by major vendors. If it's used just by SMBs or in one department, fine."

But Freund also says the price and software features such as online migration, hot spanning, and drive roaming could catch the attention of system integrators. The software features were in Raidcore’s previous SATA controller, but will probably be taken more seriously now that they’re part of Broadcom products.

"They have some rather nifty features, but when it was just little RaidCore, you had a question about viability,” he says. “The good news is it’s now part of Broadcom, and because of the scale of this you don’t have to put it right at the heart of your infrastructure. You can start out using it as a filer or to archive.”— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch