Broadcom Co-Sponsor for SFF-TA-1005 Universal Backplane Management Spec

Broadcom Inc. co-sponsored and developed the approved SFF-TA-1005 Universal Backplane Management (UBM) specification with Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) and 19 other participants, which provides a common management framework for SAS, SATA, and NVMe devices.

The SFF-TA-1005 UBM specification will help to unify and standardize backplane management in the data center.

“Control and management of multi-protocol backplanes has been loosely defined in the industry, making it a challenge for companies to simplify designs and product offerings. Broadcom joined forces with HPE and Dell EMC to bring clarity and simplicity to the management of SAS, SATA, and NVMe drives,” said Jas Tremblay, VP and GM, data center solutions group, Broadcom. “Broadcom continues to spearhead storage industry standards development to enable a healthier ecosystem.“

Working with storage ecosystem suppliers through SNIA/SFF on the UBM standard provides a robust definition of a management standard that can be widely adopted across the industry. Broadcom’s collaboration with HPE and other industry partners ensures universal storage bay management is supported by, and compatible with, all ecosystem components.

“Standardizing how IT infrastructure is managed is at the core of HPE’s commitment to simplify hybrid IT for our customers,” said Tom Lattin, VP and GM, mass market platforms, options and software, HPE. “By collaborating with partners like Broadcom on industry standards such as UBM and U.3 Universal Drive Bay, HPE helps global businesses deploy more versatile and streamlined server infrastructure. Universal backplanes that incorporate emerging NVMe drives with SAS and SATA will give customers the flexibility to choose the most optimized drive configurations for their workloads.“

UBM is finding support from a variety of server and storage OEMs, large data centers and device vendors.

Key benefits of UBM include:

Holistic support of SAS, SATA and PCIe (NVMe) backplanes
Supports storage topologies such as controller-, expander- and switch-attach
High-speed lane mapping descriptions
Device slot and device presence information
Management of LED states and slot power control and
Management of PCIe Reset and Reference Clock mechanisms
Flexibility for future extensions

The UBM reference platform unifies the capabilities of various backplane management schemes, including functionality provided in SGPIO (SFF-8485), 2-Wire SES and 2-Wire PCA9555 usages. UBM (SFF-TA-1005) is driven out of the SNIA SFF Technology Affiliate (TA) Technical Work Group (TWG).

The Specification for Universal Backplane Management can be found at the SNIA website.