BCM8603 - 8-Port SAS/SATA II to PCI-X®/Express® RAID-on-Chip Controller

8-Port SAS/SATA II to PCI-X®/Express® RAID-on-Chip Controller

The BCM8603 is the industry's first SAS/SATA RAID-on-Chip (RoC) device targeted at volume server and workstation markets. This highly integrated, multi-functional RoC device provides the cost, space and power savings required to accelerate the transition of enterprise-class RAID technology to a RAID-on-Motherboard (RoMB) solution. As a result of its cost-effective, single-chip design, the new Broadcom RoC will increase RAID adoption on cost-sensitive server and workstation platforms.

The BCM8603 RoC also enables the transition from parallel PCI-X host interfaces to cost-effective, high-performance serial PCI Express host interfaces. To accommodate this transition, Broadcom has integrated support for both host bus architectures onto the BCM8603 RoC providing users with a choice of host interfaces based on their system I/O availability.

Additional enterprise-class RAID functionality is provided by Broadcom's highly portable and scalable XelCore RAID software. The software provides support for all popular RAID levels and incorporates such enterprise-class features as online capacity expansion, online RAID level migration, and the ability to create storage arrays that span multiple storage controllers without having to bring the system down.

  • Eight 3 Gigabit per second SAS/SATA-II I/O controller ports.
  • Choice of PCI Express® and PCI-X host interfaces.
  • Embedded MIPS® processor to run RAID firmware and XelCore™ RAID software.
  • RAID5 hardware acceleration logic to increase performance