APPLICATIONS

Broadcom Corporation, a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor solutions enabling broadband communications, today announced a distribution agreement with Ideal Hardware (the United Kingdom subsidiary of Bell Microproducts) to offer Broadcom RAIDCore Serial ATA (SATA) RAID controller cards in the U.K. and throughout Europe. Included in this distribution agreement are the BC4000 SATA-based controller cards, the second generation of Broadcom's popular RAID controller card family. Ideal Hardware, which has earned VNU Media's "Storage Distributor of the Year" award every year since its inception, is one of the largest providers of storage and RAID solutions in Europe and distributes storage solutions to more than 3,000 resellers. Through this distribution agreement with Broadcom, Ideal Hardware adds a leading RAID controller card line to its extensive storage catalog, allowing it to address the increasing storage and security needs of the small-to-medium-sized business (SMBs), enterprise IT and digital content creation markets. "With Ideal Hardware at the forefront of leading-edge storage solutions, this agreement to distribute Broadcom's BC4000 RAID controller cards enables us to promote extremely cost-effective, high-performance SATA-based RAID solutions throughout Europe, providing our channel partners with new market opportunities," said Ian Lockhart, Sales Manager for Storage Solutions at Ideal Hardware. "The BC4000 is setting the pace for features and performance and we are delighted to be a premier carrier for Broadcom and this product family throughout Europe." The multi-billion dollar digital content creation market is a growing segment of the European business and IT community and is an area of focus for Ideal Hardware with respect to RAID controller technology. This market segment includes video pre- and post- production activities supporting ever-increasing digital content applications such as new pan-European high definition television channels, video streaming, video surveillance, video editing, video on demand and computer graphics. Using storage-intensive applications, digital content creators require the high levels of capacity, redundancy and data integrity that RAID storage provides, as well as the ability to quickly and reliably access large amounts of data. As a result, digital content creators within this storage intensive market require the performance characteristics and high reliability that have typically been associated with SCSI RAID controller cards, but without the high cost of SCSI controllers. The BC4000 SATA-based controller cards are changing this paradigm by providing the industry's most extensive and robust feature set for SATA-based RAID applications through the use of high-capacity and low-price SATA drive technology. These low-profile compliant controller cards are the only 2U compatible SATA RAID controller cards available today and deliver the highest performance possible utilizing 64-bit, 133 MHz PCI-X support. Using eight drives, the BC4852 controller card performs RAID0 sequential reads and writes of 458 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 411 MB/s respectively, and RAID5 sequential reads and writes of 407 MB/s and 343 MB/s respectively, all of which represents performance leadership. "We are seeing significant demand for our BC4000 RAID controller cards from Europe's digital content creation marketplace and believe that Ideal Hardware is the perfect partner to open these market opportunities for us," said Tom Marmen, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Storage Line of Business. "With almost two decades of European storage sales and integration successes, Ideal Hardware will enable Broadcom to reach these important storage market resellers in Europe and allow us to communicate the advantages of designing a RAID solution that is completely integrated from silicon to software." The BC4000 RAID controller cards deliver enterprise-class RAID features not available with any other SATA-based RAID controller, such as online capacity expansion, controller spanning, online RAID level migration, mirror splitting and array hiding, and the ability to create storage arrays that span multiple controllers without having to bring the system down. The BC4000 also features a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive SATA RAID controller cards. Pricing and Availability The Broadcom RAIDCore BC4000 SATA-based RAID controller cards are now available from Ideal Hardware resellers in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe. The U.S. manufacturer's suggested list prices are $365 (U.S.) for the 8-channel controller card (BC4852) and $289 (U.S.) for the 4-channel controller card (BC4452). Ideal Hardware Ltd. is the UK subsidiary of Bell Microproducts Inc. The $2.5 billion Nasdaq listed Bell Microproducts Inc. is one of the world's largest storage-focused distribution companies, operating from more than 40 locations and employing over 1,100 people across the United States, Canada, Latin America, the United Kingdom and Europe. The European operation is headquartered in Chessington, UK, with sales offices in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands.