NVMe RAID Solution with management capabilities

The Broadcom NVMe RAID family further extends its NVMe portfolio launched in 2016, comprised of 32 NVMe hardware RAID adapters and the 7th generation of MegaRAID software. Additional benefits of the Broadcom investment in NVMe include:

• Compliance to the latest Storage Industry standards (U.3, SFF-TA-1001) and (UBM, SFF-TA-1005).
• One, two and four times direct attached device support.
• NVMe drive interoperability; completed qualification with seven drive vendors.

Jas Tremblay, vice president and general manager, Data Centre Solutions Group, Broadcom, stated: “Broadcom’s investment in NVMe is backed by a commitment to next-generation server RAID silicon and software, industry standards, and robust compatibility; further enabling the ecosystem with the critical NVMe building blocks they demand. For several applications, data centres depend on Broadcom RAID and have started deployment with NVMe drives.”

The Broadcom storage test team has been helping storage vendors harden SAS/SATA drives for 12 years. The storage test team works with third party drive vendors to qualify enterprise-ready devices, giving customers confidence when selecting which components to integrate with Broadcom storage devices. The team has developed many test cases for NVMe drives, including Mixed Mode, Hot Add/Remove and Stress tests while testing more than 50 drive models to date.

Server and drive providers are now deploying Broadcom’s NVMe hardware RAID. This cutting-edge technology enables customers to build flexible, high-performing, low-latency enterprise systems across a range of applications and industries.

CT Sun, CTO and vice president of engineering, at AIC, stated: “NVMe-based storage servers, rack and flash arrays are becoming a necessity in the rapidly changing data centre and cloud computing market, especially for those building mixed-drive hybrid solutions for hyper-scale and big data applications. Broadcom’s NVMe Hardware RAID solutions allows us to accommodate small footprint requirements where high-bandwidth, high-density, and reliability is essential.”

Two industry standards that are helping to enable the deployment of Broadcom’s Tri-Mode family of adapters include:

• SFF-TA-1001 (U.3), which defines a common bay type for SAS, SATA and NVMe.
• SFF-TA-1005, or Universal Backplane Management (UBM), which defines a common backplane control and management framework for SAS, SATA and NVMe drives.

Tri-Mode, together with U.3 and UBM, will define the ingredient capabilities to easily deploy SAS/SATA and NVMe in next-generation server storage systems.