Broadcom Unveils First Serial ATA Host-Bus Adapters

Broadcom Monday unveiled the company's first Serial ATA RAID host-bus adapters in a move to capitalize on the burgeoning SATA market.

The Irvine, Calif.-based vendor, known more for its silicon-based components in the broadband and telecom industry, is taking advantage of its acquisition of RAIDcore, a Nashua, N.H.-based developer of host-bus adapters mainly in the SATA space, as well as storage management software.

The move by Broadcom to enter the SATA host-bus adapter space goes far in rounding out the company's storage offerings following its entry into the SAN switch market following last year's acquisition of Gadzooks, said Mark Taylor, director of RAID marketing for the company and a former RAIDcore executive.

Target market for the new controllers is OEMs as well as distributors targeting the white-box market for small and midsize businesses, Taylor said.

"Many white-box builders have RAID 0+1 on their motherboards," he said. "My job is to convince them to go for RAID 5. Our biggest help in this is Dell, which publicly said it wants to push RAID 5 in an effort to sell more hard disks."

Broadcom's goal with the new SATA host-bus adapters is to simplify the installation and use of RAID in smaller companies, Taylor said. "We want to squeeze as much cost out of IT as possible," he said. "We want to take IT-intensive processes out."

Broadcom this week is shipping two SATA host-bus adapters. The BC4452-H four-channel controller has a list price of $289, compared with $365 for the eight-channel BC4852-H. Both units fit in 2U rack-mount cabinets.

The controllers also offer staggered drive startup, a technology that gradually restarts hard drives instead of turning them on all at once after a power failure, said Taylor.

Also included in the controllers is spanning, under which storage arrays can be spanned over multiple controllers to increase performance, said Taylor. The controllers also feature logical spare drives, which means data is protected without the need to keep a spare drive powered down until it is required, he said.

Broadcom's controllers are available from Bell Microproducts.

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