• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Broadcom Doubles Performance of Fibre Channel Infrastructure Market With Industry's First 4 Gbps Fibre Channel Fabric Switches

Posted on: Monday, 24 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

IRVINE, Calif., May 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Broadcom Corporation , a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor solutions enabling broadband communications, today launched the enterprise storage industry's first 4 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel fabric switches. These new devices fulfill the demand for an affordable storage and server Fibre Channel fabric interconnect for the rapidly growing small-to-medium sized business (SMB) segment and for embedded applications. In addition, they are designed to enable the replacement of traditional loop-switch architectures in high-density enterprise storage arrays.

Through the introduction of these products, Broadcom is squarely positioned to take advantage of two major trends in storage area networks (SANs): the rapid growth of Fibre Channel for SMB and the transition to 4 Gbps Fibre Channel. With the goal of increasing the overall size of the Fibre Channel market, Fibre Channel manufacturers are pushing their technology, previously deployed mainly in large enterprise networks, down into the widely untapped and growing SMB segment. The second major trend is that of storage original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) introducing higher performance products at price points previously associated with lower data transmission speeds, to increase end-customer value and preserve overall average sale prices. The industry adoption of 4 Gbps Fibre Channel products at 2 Gbps price points is expected to duplicate the highly successful and similar transition to 2 Gbps from 1 Gbps Fibre Channel.

Industry analyst firm IDC projects that Fibre Channel SMB port sales will grow at a nearly 80 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2008. According to Gartner/Dataquest, 4 Gbps Fibre Channel will grow at a CAGR of nearly 300 percent through 2007 and become the dominant speed for new Fibre Channel products in two years' time.

The BCM8440: Full Featured Fabric Switch for Economical Storage Networks

The Broadcom(R) BCM8440 fabric switch, introduced today, addresses the rapid growth of Fibre Channel in price-sensitive segments such as SMB and embedded applications. It provides a standards-compliant, full-featured solution that doubles the performance of fabric switches available on the market today. Its low power and minimal board space requirements make the BCM8440 well suited for embedded applications and network half-rack form factors - ideal for deploying redundant networks as two identical switches can now be placed side by side on one rack shelf.

"The SAN switch market is migrating rapidly to 4 Gbps," said Steve Rago, Principal Analyst with the Networking and Optical Communications Analysis Service at the market research firm iSuppli Corp., El Segundo, Calif. "The first company to offer a 4 Gbps solution for the small-to-medium sized business market will have a competitive advantage over its competition."

The BCM8441: Fabric Switch for High Density Storage Arrays

The Broadcom BCM8441 fabric switch, also introduced today, provides break-through performance advantages and significant cost savings by enabling a single Fibre Channel controller to read and write to multiple drives at the same time, significantly improving the performance of Fibre Channel storage platforms and arrays and reducing the number of controllers required in an array. This contrasts with legacy port-bypass circuit (PBC) and loop-switch architectures that allow a Fibre Channel controller to read or write to only one disk drive at a time resulting in much lower throughput. To compensate, OEMs traditionally have had to increase the number of controllers in an array; however that significantly increased overall system cost.

For Fibre Channel storage systems that employ RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technology in which information is read from and written to multiple disks for greater reliability, the ability of the BCM8441 to communicate with multiple drives at one time provides up to a 300 percent improvement in the number of transactions per second and doubles the throughput of solutions using either loop switch or PBC architectures. Furthermore, the BCM8441 eliminates the loop switch restriction of no more than 126 drives, paving the way for significantly greater storage capacity in the future.

"With the recent introduction of small form factor storage disk drives, coupled with regulatory and compliance requirements that are driving greater storage demands, array densities are tripling and quadrupling, forcing vendors to look at new architectures," said Michael McDonald, Senior Director of Broadcom's Fibre Channel Storage Line of Business. "Fabric-based architectures address increased densities by providing greater scalability, increased performance and decreased latency over legacy PBC and loop switch architectures."

"The advent of 4 Gbps Fibre Channel fabric switches brings a new, competitively-priced, high-performance technology to an area that traditionally has been reserved for PBCs and loop switches," said Denise De Leon, Senior Analyst with the Storage Market Analysis Service at iSuppli. "The additional speed, coupled with the architectural efficiencies achieved with fabric switches, makes this an attractive solution for storage arrays."

Technical Information

The BCM8440 fabric switch is a standards-compliant, 16-port 4 Gbps Fibre Channel fabric switch powered by a 500+ Gbps internal non-blocking fabric that provides full wire speed performance under extreme network conditions. It utilizes a fully integrated architecture that includes the fabric, serializer/deserializers (SerDes) and memory. The BCM8440 supports standard Fibre Channel protocols, including point-to-point, fabric and Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) protocols. Differing from competing loop switch products, the BCM8440 complies with the FC-AL-2 Loop Port State Machine (LPSM) Transfer State standard, making it interoperable with all Fibre Channel host bus adapters on the market. By conforming to this common standard, the BCM8440 eliminates serious issues such as LIP storms, SCSI timeouts and lost drives.

Security mechanisms inside the BCM8440 fabric switch include hard, soft and firm zoning. In addition, the reference design supports VPN and IPSec security, adding an additional layer of security and authentication to customers' Fibre Channel SANs.

The BCM8441 offers many of the same features available within the BCM8440; however it is better aligned with the shorter distances found within storage arrays, thereby reducing internal memory and overall fabric bandwidth requirements. In addition, the BCM8441 only supports soft and firm zoning. The BCM8441 is pin and software compatible with the BCM8440, simplifying system development for customers developing multiple products at different price points.

All Broadcom Fibre Channel products incorporate Broadcom's advanced Active-SI(TM) (Active Signal Integrity) and Active-LI(TM) (Active Link Integrity) diagnostic features to help detect and recover from signal impairments at both the physical and link layers of the transmitted Fibre Channel data. With built-in advanced diagnostics, these devices greatly improve RAS-D (reliability, availability, serviceability and diagnostics) to the storage network.

Availability

Both products were developed utilizing 0.13-micron CMOS process technology and are packaged in a 792-pin EBGA. They are sampling today to Broadcom's key customers. Pricing is available upon request.

About Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor solutions that enable broadband communications and networking of voice, video and data services. We design, develop and supply complete system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions incorporating digital, analog, radio frequency (RF), microprocessor and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies, as well as related hardware and software system-level applications. Our diverse product portfolio addresses every major broadband communications market and includes solutions for digital cable and satellite set-top boxes; high definition television (HDTV); cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) modems and residential gateways; high-speed transmission and switching for local, metropolitan, wide area and storage networking; home and wireless networking; cellular and terrestrial wireless communications; Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway and telephony systems; broadband network and security processors; and SystemI/O(TM) server solutions. These technologies and products support our core mission: Connecting everything(R).

Broadcom is headquartered in Irvine, Calif., and may be contacted at 1-949-450-8700 or at http://www.broadcom.com/ .

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:

All statements included or incorporated by reference in this release, other than statements or characterizations of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, estimates and projections about our industry, management's beliefs, and certain assumptions made by us, all of which are subject to change. Forward-looking statements can often be identified by words such as "anticipates,""expects,""intends,""plans,""predicts,""believes,""seeks,""estimates,""may,""will,""should,""would,""could,""potential,""continue,""ongoing," similar expressions, and variations or negatives of these words. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause our actual results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statement.

Important factors that may cause such a difference for Broadcom in connection with its BCM8440 and BCM8441 Fibre Channel fabric switch products, include, but are not limited to, general economic and political conditions and specific conditions in the markets we address, including the volatility in the technology sector and semiconductor industry, trends in the broadband communications markets in various geographic regions, and possible disruption in commercial activities related to terrorist activity or armed conflict in the United States and other locations; the rate at which our present and future customers and end-users adopt Broadcom's technologies and products in the markets for storage networking applications; delays in the adoption and acceptance of industry standards in those markets; competitive pressures and other factors such as the qualification, availability and pricing of competing products and technologies and the resulting effects on sales and pricing of our products; our ability to scale our operations in response to increases in demand for our products and services; the timing, rescheduling or cancellation of significant customer orders and our ability, as well as the ability of our customers, to manage inventory; the availability and pricing of third party semiconductor foundry and assembly capacity and raw materials; our ability to retain and hire key executives, technical personnel and other employees in the numbers, with the capabilities, and at the compensation levels needed to implement our business and product plans; fluctuations in the manufacturing yields of our third party semiconductor foundries and other problems or delays in the fabrication, assembly, testing or delivery of our products; the risks of producing products with new suppliers and at new fabrication and assembly facilities; the loss of a key customer; our ability to specify, develop or acquire, complete, introduce, market and transition to volume production new products and technologies in a timely manner; the timing of customer-industry qualification and certification of our products and the risks of non- qualification or non-certification; the volume of our product sales and pricing concessions on volume sales; the effects of new and emerging technologies; changes in our product or customer mix; intellectual property disputes and customer indemnification claims and other types of litigation risk; problems or delays that we may face in shifting our products to smaller geometry process technologies and in achieving higher levels of design integration; the quality of our products and any remediation costs; the effectiveness of our expense and product cost control and reduction efforts; the risks and uncertainties associated with our international operations, particularly in light of recent events; the effects of natural disasters, public health emergencies, international conflicts and other events beyond our control; the level of orders received that can be shipped in a fiscal quarter; and other factors.

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, recent Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss the foregoing risks as well as other important risk factors that could contribute to such differences or otherwise affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. The forward-looking statements in this release speak only as of this date. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statement for any reason.

Broadcom(R), the pulse logo, Connecting everything(R), Active-LI(TM), Active-SI(TM) and SystemI/O(TM) are trademarks of Broadcom Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. Any other trademarks or trade names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

Broadcom Trade Press Contact

Mike He

Sr. Communications Specialist

408-922-8083

mhe@broadcom.com

Broadcom Business Press Contact

Bill Blanning

Sr. Director, Corporate Communications

949-926-5555

blanning@broadcom.com

Broadcom Technical Contact

Michael McDonald

Senior Director, Storage Switching

408-922-8374

mcdonald@broadcom.com

Broadcom Investor Relations Contact

T. Peter Andrew

Sr. Director, Investor Relations

949-926-5663

andrewtp@broadcom.com

Broadcom Corporation

CONTACT: Broadcom Trade Press: Mike He, Sr. Communications Specialist,+1-408-922-8083, mhe@broadcom.com, or Broadcom Business Press: Bill Blanning,Sr. Director, Corporate Communications, +1-949-926-5555,blanning@broadcom.com, or Broadcom Technical: Michael McDonald, SeniorDirector, Storage Switching, +1-408-922-8374, mcdonald@broadcom.com; orBroadcom Investor Relations: T. Peter Andrew, Sr. Director, InvestorRelations, +1-949-926-5663, andrewtp@broadcom.com, all of BroadcomCorporation

Web site: http://www.broadcom.com/

More News in this Category