BCM8603

Description

The BCM8603 is the industry's first SAS/SATA RAID-on-Chip (RoC) device targeted at volume server and workstation markets. BCM8603 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 BCM8603 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 of BCM8603 is provided by Broadcom's highly portable and scalable XelCore RAID software. The software about BCM8603 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.