Is Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) a Software or Hardware RAID Solution?

Can Intel® VROC be considered a software RAID solution because it does not need extra hardware?

Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) is a hybrid RAID solution.

It has attributes like hardware RAID because of the key silicon feature called Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD), which is offered with the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Intel® VROC utilizes Intel® VMD to aggregate NVMe* SSDs allowing bootable RAID.

Intel® VROC also has attributes like software RAID. For instance, it uses some of the CPU cores to calculate the RAID logic.

Because of this combination of software and silicon, Intel® VROC is called a hybrid RAID solution.

Learn more about the Intel® VROC features in Overview of Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC).