Broadcom Inc., a provider of hyperscale video storage connectivity, recently announced that it is expanding its hardware, software and silicon storage connectivity products with enhanced performance, features and power. This expanded product portfolio is the result of multigenerational investments aimed at helping hyperscale data centers manage and maintain the storage connectivity needed to deliver video storage at scale.
Today's hyperscale data centers face unprecedented growth in storage demand, driven by video-intensive content, including social media, streaming services, collaboration and many other digital transformation applications. Managing the growth of this data requires an infrastructure that is not only efficient and scalable, but that maintains a high level of security while ensuring manageability through advanced telemetry and diagnostics.
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“Hyperscale data centers are flooded with data, including vast amounts of user-generated video content, and are designed to deploy the most storage in the industry,” said Charlie Kawwas, Ph. D., president of the Semiconductor Solutions Group from Broadcom. “Broadcom is leading innovation across core technology, products and the end-to-end connected portfolio. Our cutting-edge video processing solutions are setting new standards in video storage, offering the lowest power consumption and latency while delivering the highest performance in the industry – all connected by Broadcom.”
Broadcom is leading the transition from compute-centric data centers to connectivity-centric data centers for hyperscale storage systems. The portfolio connects components within the storage network to storage systems and, ultimately, storage media. Broadcom's scale of investment and commitment to this segment enables end-to-end power-optimized performance for video offloading, providing significantly more power and simplified interoperability and support for the ecosystem.
“This announcement provides further evidence that connectivity and the underlying hardware that supports it have become more critical than ever. As more workloads run in the cloud and the demands of those workloads increase in scale, infrastructure optimization becomes more challenging,” said Dave Vellante, principal analyst at Wikibon Research. “Broadcom continues to demonstrate that it understands how to deliver balanced, consistent performance while increasing efficiency levels. The latest updates to its cloud data center storage connectivity portfolio further support these trends.”
Product portfolio
- Tomahawk 5 51TB Ethernet Switch: A family of high-speed, high-base, low-latency top-of-rack Ethernet switches that expand hyperscale storage clusters through standard 200G, 400G, or 800G Ethernet connectivity. The latest member, Tomahawk 5, delivers an unprecedented 51.2 Tbps performance, making it the highest bandwidth switching chip on the market today with the lowest power consumption. Newly introduced Cognitive Routing and a rich suite of in-band programmable telemetry enable the highest precision end-to-end congestion control, maximizing network utilization for the most demanding storage networks.
- 200G RDMA Ethernet Network Cards: Ethernet NICs connect storage systems to the network using RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). Cloud providers are selecting Broadcom for its power and hardware-based congestion control, which offers the lowest deterministic latency at scale.
- Video offload accelerator: Video accelerators help offload compute-intensive high-density video transcoding functions from the general-purpose CPU. These custom hardware accelerators support advanced codec formats including H.265, VP9, and AV1, providing approximately 100x greater efficiency compared to video transcoding software running on a general-purpose CPU.
- 9600 Storage HBAs: 8th generation HBAs connect host CPUs to storage drives and expanders. The 9600 Series doubles performance and enables industry-first features such as rapid OCP failover and multi-actuator support, while supporting advanced security features such as secure hardware initialization and attestation.
- SAS4 Storage Expanders: Storage expanders connect hundreds to thousands of drives to storage HBAs. The industry's most reliable expander now supports 24G SAS, advanced bandwidth aggregation and enhanced security. It also utilizes Broadcom's SerDes to reduce overall system power and cost.
- Custom HDD Controller SoCs : The HDD controller SoC connects the drive to the storage HBA or expanders. Broadcom's IP and read channel technology enable the industry's highest areal density HDDs with the lowest operating power. These custom SoCs share a common internal SerDes with Broadcom's latest HBAs, expanders, and I/O controllers to provide robust interoperability at scale.
- TrueStore HDD Preamps: HDD preamps connect the HDD SoC to the platters. They are highly complex mixed-signal devices responsible for accurately writing and reading data from disks inside an HDD. The latest TrueStore preamps enable advanced recording technologies such as power-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) with the industry's highest capacity and lowest power consumption.
