 Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm Dave Nicholson, Chief Technology Officer at theCUBE, and we're here for a very special CUBE conversation with Andy Brown from Broadcom. Andy, welcome to theCUBE. Tell us a little about yourself. A little bit about myself. My name is Andy Brown. I'm currently the Senior Director of Software Architecture and Performance Analysis here within the Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom. I've been doing that for about seven years. Prior to that, I held various positions within the System Architecture Systems Engineering and IC Development Organization, but ultimately, as well as spent some time in our support organization and managing our support team, but ultimately have landed in the architecture organization as well as performance analysis. Great. So a lot of what you do is around improving storage performance. Tell us more about that. So let me give you a brief history of storage from my perspective. As I mentioned, I go back about 30 years in my career and that would have started back in the NCR Microelectronics days and originally with Parallel SCSI. So that would be if anyone would remember the 5380 controller, which was one of the original Parallel SCSI controllers that existed and built by NCR Microelectronics at the time. I've seen the advent of Parallel SCSI, a stint of fiber channel, ultimately leading into the serialization of the SCSI standard into SAS as well as SATA, and then ultimately leading to NVMe protocols and the advent of flash moving from hard drives into a flash-based media. And as well on that's on the storage side, on the host side, moving from parallel interfaces, ISA, if everybody could remember that, moving to PCI, PCI Express, that's where we land today. So Andy, we're square in the middle of the era of both NVMe and SAS. What kinds of challenges does that overlap represent? Well, I think, you know, obviously we've seen SAS around for a while, was the conversion from parallel into a serial to SCSI, and that really SAS brings with it the ability to connect really a high number of devices and was kind of the original scaling of devices and really also enabled, was one of the things that enabled flash-based media, given the speed and performance that came to the table. Of course, NVMe came in as well with the promise of even higher speeds. And as we saw flash media really, really take a strong role in storage, NVMe came around and really was focused on trying to address that. Whereas SAS originated with hard drive technology, NVMe was really born out of how do we, how do we most efficiently deal with flash-based media? You know, SAS with its, but SAS still carries a benefit on scalability NVMe, maybe has, I don't want to say challenges there, but it's definitely, was not designed as much to be broadly scaled across many, many, say hundreds or thousands of devices, but definitely addressed some of the performance issues that were coming up as flash media was becoming so, was increasing the overall storage performance that we could experience, if you will. Let's talk about host interfaces like PCIe. What's the significance there? Really, all the storage in the world, all the performance in the world on the storage side is not of much use to you unless you can really feed it into the beast, if you will, into the CPU and into the rest of the server subsystem. And that's really where PCI comes into play. PCI originally was in parallel form and then moved to serial with PCI Express as we know it today. And really has created a pathway to enable, not only storage performance, but any other adapter or any other networking or other types of technologies to just open up that pathway and feed the processor. And as we've moved through from PCI to PCI Express, PCI 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and just opening up those pipes has really enabled just a tremendous amount of flow of data into the compute engine, allowing it to be analyzed, sorted, used to analyze data, big data, AI type applications. Just those pipes are critical in those types of applications. We know we've seen dramatic increases in performance going from one generation of PCIe to the next, but how does that translate into the worlds of SAS, SATA, and NVMe? So from a performance perspective, when we look at these different types of media, whether it be SATA, SAS, or NVMe, of course, there are performance difference inherent in that media, SATA being probably the lowest performing with NVMe topping out at higher performing, although SAS can perform quite well as a flash-based, as protocol connected to flash-based media. And of course, NVMe from an individual device scaling from a buy one to a buy four interface, really, that is where NVMe kind of has enabled a bigger pipe directly to the storage media, being able to scale up to buy four, whereas SAS is kind of limited to buy one, maybe buy two in some cases, although most servers only connect the SAS device to buy one. So from a difference perspective, then you're really wanting to create a solution or enable the infrastructure to be able to consume that performance that NVMe is gonna give you. And I think that that is something where our solutions have really, in the recent generations, shined at their ability to really now keep up with storage performance in NVMe, as well as provide that connectivity back down into the SAS and SATA world as well. Let's talk about your perspective on RAID today. So there've been a lot of views and opinions on RAID over the years, and those have been changing over time. RAID has been around for a very, very long time, probably about as long as, again, going back over my 30-year career, it's been around for almost the entire time. Obviously, RAID originally was viewed as something that was very, very necessary. Devices fail, they don't last forever, but the data that's on them is very, very important, and people care about that. So RAID was brought about knowing that individual devices that are storing that data are gonna fail, and really took hold as a primary mechanism of protection. But as time went on, and as performance moved up, both in the server and both in the media itself, if we start talking about flash, RAID really took on, people started to look at traditional server storage RAID, but maybe a more of a negative connotation, I think that because, to be quite honest, it fell behind a little bit. If you look at things like Parity RAID, RAID 5 and RAID 6, very, very effective and efficient means of protecting your data, very storage efficient, but ultimately had some penalties, primarily around RAID performance, random RAIDs and RAID 5 volumes was not keeping up with what really needed to be there. And I think that really shifted opinions of RAID that, hey, it's just not gonna keep up and we need to move on to other avenues. And we've seen that, we've seen disaggregated storage and other solutions pop up to protect your data, obviously in cloud environments and things like that have shown up and they have been successful. So one of the drawbacks with RAID is always the performance tax associated with generating Parity for Parity RAID. What has Broadcom done to address those potential bottlenecks? We've really solved the RAID performance issue, the RAID performance issue. We're in our latest generation of controllers, we're exceeding a million RAID 5 RAID IOPS which is enough to satisfy many, many, many applications as a matter of fact, even in virtual environments aggregated solutions where you have multiple applications. And then as well in the rebuild arena, we really have through our architecture, through our hardware automation have been able to move the bar on that to where the rebuild, not only the rebuild times have been brought down dramatically in flash-based solutions, but the performance that you can observe while those rebuilds are going on is almost immeasurable. So in most applications, you would almost observe no performance deficiencies during a rebuild operation, which is really night and day compared to where things were just a few short years ago. So the fact that you've been able to dramatically decrease the time necessary for a RAID rebuild is obviously extremely important. But give us your overall performance philosophy from Broadcom's point of view. You know, over the years, we have recognized that performance is obviously critically important for our products and the ability to analyze performance from many, many angles is critically important. There are literally infinite ways you can look at performance in a storage subsystem. What we have done in our labs and in our solutions through not only hardware scaling in our labs, but also through automation scripts and things like that have allowed us to collect a substantial amount of data to look at the performance of our solutions from every angle, you know, IOPS, bandwidth, application level performance, small topologies, large topologies, just many, many aspects. It still honestly only scratches the surface of all the possible performance points that you could gather, but it has, we have moved the bar dramatically in that regard. And it's something that our customers really demanded of us. You know, storage technology has gotten more complex and you have to look at it from a lot different angles, especially on the performance front to make sure that there are no holes there that somebody's gonna run into. So based on specific customer needs and requests, you look at performance from a variety of different angles. What are some of the trends that you're seeing specifically in storage performance today and moving into the future? Yeah, emerging trends within the storage industry. I think that to look at the emerging trends, you really need to go back and look at where we started. We started in compute where people were, you would have basically your server that would be under the desk in a small business operation and individual businesses would have their own set of servers and the storage would really be localized to those. Obviously the industry has recognized that to some extent disaggregation of that and we see that obviously in what's happening in cloud, in hyperconverged storage and things like that. Those afford a tremendous amount of flexibility and are obviously great players in the storage world today. But what with that flexibility has come some sacrifice in performance and actually quite substantial sacrifice. And what we're observing is almost, it comes back full circle, the need for inbox high performing server storage that is well protected and with people with confidence that their data is protected and that they can extract the performance that they need for the demanding database applications that still exists today and they still operate in the offices around the country and around the world that really need to protect their data on a local basis in the server. And I think that from a trend perspective, that's what we're seeing. Also from the standpoint of NVMe store, NVMe itself is really started out with, hey, we'll just software raid that. We'll just wrap software around that and we can protect the data. We had so many customers come back to us saying, you know what, we really need hardware raid on NVMe. And when they came to us, we were ready. We had a solution ready to go and we're able to provide that and now we're seeing ongoing on and on and on. We are complimentary to other storage solutions out there. Server storage is not gonna necessarily rule the world but it surely has a place in the broader storage spectrum and we think we have the right solution for that. Speaking of servers and server-based storage, why would, for example, a Dell customer care about the Broadcom components in that Dell server? So let's say you're configuring a Dell server and you're going, why does hardware raid matter? What's important about that? Well, I think when you look at today's hardware raid, first of all, you're gonna see dramatically better performance. You're gonna see dramatically better performance in, it's gonna enable you to put RAID 5 volumes, a very effective and efficient mechanism for protecting your data, a storage efficient mechanism. You're gonna use RAID 5 volumes where you weren't able to do that before because when you're in the millions of IOPS range, you really can satisfy a lot of application needs out there and then you're also going to have rebuild times that are lightning fast. Your performance is not gonna degrade when you're running those applications, especially database applications but not only database but streaming applications. Bandwidth to protected RAID volumes is almost imperceptibly different from just raw bandwidth to the media. So the RAID configurations in today's Dell servers really afford you the opportunity to make use of that storage where you may have already written it off as well RAID just is not gonna get me there. Quite frankly, in the storage servers that Dell is providing with RAID technology, there are huge windows open in what you can do today with applications. Well, all of this is obviously good news for Dell and Dell customers. Thanks again, Andy, for joining us for this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson for theCUBE.