hello and welcome to the cube 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 the cube tell us a little about yourself a little bit my 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 i 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 uh storage from from my perspective um you know i 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 scuzzy so that would be if anyone would remember the 5380 controller which was one of the original parallel scuzzy controllers that existed and built by ncr microelectronics at the time i've i've seen the advent of parallel scuzzy a stint of fiber channel ultimately leading into the serialization of those of the scuzzy 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 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 it was the conversion from parallel into a serial attached scuzzy and that really sas brings with it the ability to uh connect on really a high number of devices um and uh was was kind of the original scaling of devices and and really uh also enabled uh was was one of the things that enabled flash based media given the the speed and performance that came to the table of course nvme came in as well with the promise of of even higher speeds and as we saw flash media really really take a strong role in storage uh nvme came around and 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 scalable 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 uh uh was 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 um really uh the all the storage in the world all of the performance in the world and on the storage side is not of much use to you unless you can really feed it into the into the beast if you will into the cpu and into this the rest of the server subsystem and that's really where pci comes into play pci uh originally was in parallel form and then moved to serial with pci express as we know it today and and really has created a pathway to to to enable not not only storage performance but any other adapter or any other networking or other other types of technologies to just open up that pathway and feed the processor if 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 into the compute engine allowing it to be analyzed sorted used to analyze data big data uh 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 um so from a performance perspective when we look at these different types of media whether it be sata sas or nvme um of course there are performance difference inherent in that media sata being probably the lowest performing with nvme uh topping out at higher performing although sas can perform quite well as a flash based you know as a protocol connected to flash based media and of course nvme from us an individual device scaling from a by one to a by four interface really that is where nvme kind of has enabled a bigger pipe directly to the storage media uh 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 by one so from a difference perspective then you're really wanting to create a solution or or enable the infrastructure to be able to consume that performance that nvme is going to give you and i think that you know that is something where our solutions have really in in the recent generations shine at their ability to really now uh keep up with uh storage performance in nvme uh 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 uh there's been a lot of uh views and opinions on raid over the years it's been a and those have been changing over time raid has been around for a very very long time uh probably about as long as again going back over my 30-year career uh it's been around for almost the entire time obviously raid originally was viewed as as something that was uh very very necessary uh 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 you know knowing that individual devices that are storing that data are going to fail and really took hold as a primary mechanism of protection but as time went on uh and and as performance moved up uh both in the server and both in in the media itself if we start talking about flash uh raid really took on people people started to look at traditional server storage raid uh but with maybe a more of a negative connotation i think that because uh to be quite honest it fell behind a little bit if you look at things like parity raid raid five and rate six very very effective and efficient means of protecting your data very storage efficient but ultimately had some penalties a primarily around wright performance random rights in raid 5 volumes was not keeping up with what really needed to be there and um i think that really shifted uh opinions of raid that hey it's just it's just not it's not going to keep up and we need to move on to other avenues and 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 it's shown up and uh and they have been successful so one of the drawbacks with raid is always the performance tax associated with generating parity for parity rate what has broadcom done to address those potential bottlenecks we've really solved the raid performance issue the right performance issue we're we're in our latest generation of controllers we're exceeding a million rate five right iops which is enough to satisfy many many many applications as a matter of fact even in virtual environments aggregated solutions we 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 sas based or in i'm sorry 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 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 in our in our labs but also through automation scripts and things like that 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 just many many aspects it's still honestly only scratches the surface of all the possible uh performance points that you could gather but it it has we have moved the bar dramatically in that regard and and it's something that our customers really demanded of us um 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 going to run into so based on specific customer needs and requests you look at performance from a variety of different angles um 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 uh in compute where people were you would have basically your uh your server that would be under the desk in a small business operation and individual uh businesses would have their own uh set of set of servers and and the storage would really be localized to those obviously the industry has recognized that um that to some extent disaggregation of that we we see that obviously in what's happening in cloud uh in hyper-converged storage and things like that those afford a tremendous amount of flexibility uh and and are obviously uh great players in the storage world today but what with that flexibility is come some sacrifice in performance and actually quite substantial sacrifice and what we're observing is almost uh it comes back full circle the uh the need for inbox high performing server storage that is well protected uh and and with people with confidence that people have confidence that their data is protected and that they can uh extract the performance that they need for the demanding database applications that still exist today and they still operate in 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 rate that we'll just we'll just wrap software around that 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 going on demand we are we are complementary to other storage solutions out there server storage is not going to necessarily rule the world but it is 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 uh uh let's say you're configuring a dell server and you're going why does why does hardware raid matter what what what's important about that well i think when you look at today's hardware raid uh first of all you're going to see dramatically better performance you're going to see dramatically better performance in it's going to enable you to put raid 5 volumes a very effective and efficient mechanism for protecting your data a storage efficient mechanism you're going to 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 uh can satisfy a lot of application needs out there and and then you're going to also going to have rebuilt times that are lightning fast your performance is not going to degrade when you're when you're running those application especially database applications but not not only database but streaming applications uh bandwidth uh to to protected raid volumes is is almost almost imperceptibly different from just raw bandwidth to the media so the rate rate configurations in today's dell servers really afford you the opportunity to make use of that storage where you you may not have uh you may have already written it off as well ray just doesn't is not going to get me there quite frankly uh into this in in the storage servers that dell is providing uh with with raid technology uh there are huge windows open and 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 the cube [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm Dave Nicholson, Chief Technology Officer at theCUBE and we are here for a very special Cube Conversation with Andy Brown from Broadcom. Andy, welcome to theCUBE, tell us a little about yourself. >> Well, 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've started back in the NCR Microelectronics days. And originally with Parallel SCSI, so that would be, if anyone would remember the the 5380 Controller, which was one of the original Parallel SCSI controllers that existed in 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 SaaS, 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 and that's where we land today. >> So Andy, we are square in the middle of the era of both NVMe and SaaS. What kinds of challenges does that overlap represent? >> Well, I think obviously we've seen SaaS around for a while, it was the conversion from parallel into a serial attached SCSI and that really SaaS 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 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 SaaS originated with hard drive technology. NVMe was really born out of how do we most efficiently deal with flash based media, SaaS with its. But SaaS still carries a benefit on scalability and NVMe maybe has, I don't want to say challenges there, but it's definitely was not designed as much to be broadly scale across many, many, say high hundreds or thousands of devices. But definitely addressed some of the performance issues that were coming up as flash media was becoming. So it was increasing the overall storage performance that we could experience if you will. >> Let's talk about host interfaces, 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 the rest of the service subsystem. And that's really where PCI comes into play. PCI originally was in parallel form and then moved to serial with the 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 SaaS, SATA and NVMe? >> So from a performance perspective when we look at these different types of media whether it be SATA, SaaS 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 SaaS 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 by one to a by 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 by four whereas SaaS can limit it to by one, maybe by two in some cases, although most servers only connect the SaaS device of by one. So from a different perspective then you're really wanting to create a solution or enable the infrastructure to be able to consume that performance at NVMe is going to give you. And I think that is something where our solutions have really in the recent generation shined, at their ability to really now keep up with storage performance and NVMe, as well as provide that connectivity back down into the SaaS 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, it's been 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 some thing 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 going to fail, and really took cold 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, well, 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 5 and RAID 6, very, very effective efficient means of protecting your data, very storage efficient, but ultimately had some penalty a primarily around right performance, random rights in 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, it's not going to 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 and protect your data obviously in cloud environments and things like that have shown up and they have been successful, but. >> So one of the drawbacks with RAID is always the performance tax associated with generating parody for parody RAID. What has Broadcom done to address those potential bottlenecks? >> We've really solved the RAID performance issue the right performance issue. We're in our latest generation of controllers we're exceeding a million RAID 5 right IOPS which is enough to satisfy many, many, many applications as a matter of fact, even in virtual environments aggregated solutions, we 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 SaaS based or in I'm sorry 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 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. >> Over the years we have recognized that performance is obviously a 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. 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 we have moved them bar dramatically in that regard. And it's something that our customers really demanded of us. 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 going to 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 per 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, we see that obviously in what's happening in cloud, in hyper-converged storage and things like that. Those afford a tremendous amount of flexibility and are obviously great players in the storage world today. But with that flexibility has come some sacrifice and 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 people have 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 that 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. We also, from the standpoint of NVMe itself is really started out with, "Hey, we'll just software rate that. We'll just wrap software around that, 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 demand. We are complimentary to other storage solutions out there. Server storage is not going to necessarily rule a world but it is 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 where RAID matter? What's important about that? Well, I think when you look at today's hardware RAID, first of all, you're going to see a dramatically better performance. You're going to see dramatically better performance it's going to enable you to put RAID 5 volumes a very effective and efficient mechanism for protecting your data, a storage efficient mechanism. You're going to 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 going to also going to have rebuilt times that are lightning fast. Your performance is not going to degrade, when you're running those application, especially database applications, but not only database, but streaming applications, bandwidth to protected RAID volumes is almost imperceptively 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 not have already written it off as well RAID just doesn't, is not going to get me there. Quite frankly, into this 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. (upbeat music)