The launch of Broadcom Inc.’s 9600 series of storage adapters in January introduced a new level of IO processing power and latency reduction.

Through integration of Broadcom’s 9600 technology in the Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller 12, enterprise customers have been able to realize significant performance gains from a solution that plays a central role in IT operations, according to Seamus Jones (right), director of server technical marketing engineering at Dell Technologies Inc.

“Critical elements within the server drive performance,” Jones said. “People almost take it for granted that these controllers exist and the performance that’s associated with them, but they enable the rest of the architecture. We look at the integration of accelerators, the adaptation of these RAID controllers to get even faster, and the partnership that we have with Broadcom has really enabled that.”

Jones spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Kimberly Leyenaar (left), principal storage performance architect at Broadcom, and they discussed how RAID controller advances are powering performance gains for IT customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Low microsecond latency

How much of a performance improvement can Broadcom’s storage adapters deliver? For highly scaled, distributed applications, latency matters, and high percentile response times, known as tail latencies, can bog down operational performance. Broadcom has realized major improvement in this area, according to Leyenaar.

“With these RAID latencies, we’re even lower than the best NVMe drives,” Leyenaar said. “You can’t have these 99.99% tail latencies that are 10 and 20 seconds, which we had seen in some of the previous generations. We’ve been able to take care of that. We can assure up to 99.99% latency up to the max IOPS less than 10 microseconds.”

This level of performance impacts a number of key industries, such as healthcare, where critical data needs to be accessible without lag. The fintech space is also taking advantage of this technology from the Dell/Broadcom partnership, according to Jones.

“In FinTech … those are high frequency traders, oftentimes they’re not necessarily using accelerators,” he said. “They’re actually using larger disk profiles and more of them. So that makes this RAID controller even more important.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE