The Fulcrum architecture is a highly integrated storage design that handles any of the popular RAID levels, has integrated cache management, and handles all coherency for multi-controller data access in storage environments. The Fulcrum architecture has many unique design features, six of which have patents pending. For use within the most advanced storage products to the simplest hardware RAID controllers, Broadcom's Fulcrum architecture is operating system, I/O bus and hardware independent, whether based on SATA (Serial ATA) or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) RAID technologies.