By Warren Miller, contributing writer
Data centers are facing similar challenges, including higher costs associated with greater power consumption or the disparate ratio between the growing demand for and dwindling supply of bandwidth. Providing greater scalability of disaggregated flash storage and storage class memory will go a long way toward addressing these challenges. Marvell recently unveiled what it claims to be the industry’s first non-volatile memory express over fabric — or NVMe-oF — solid-state drive (SSD) converter controller optimally designed for cloud and enterprise data centers.
The 88SN2400 controller is engineered to convert standard NVMe SSDs into NVMe-oF SSDs by providing low-latency access over the fabric and bringing the entire SSD bandwidth to the network. The controller eschews the more traditional peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) fabric for a low-power Ethernet fabric, allowing for better scalability and utilization while reducing total cost of ownership.
The 88SN2400 supports up to 18M input/output operations per second (IOPS). Using a Marvell Ethernet switch that supports 2 Tb/s and the 88SN2400, the solution delivers a 150-GB/s pipe of pooled storage, thereby providing a better rate of power consumption per I/O than comparable devices that implement more traditional architectures.
”As cloud and enterprise data centers increase their deployments of flash storage and emerging storage class memories to address growing and diversifying workloads such as AI and analytics, it is paramount that they optimize the utilization, efficiency, and scale of these costly resources,” according to Nigel Alvares, vice president of SSD and Data Center Storage Solutions at Marvell. “Our converter controller enables disruptive disaggregated NAND and SCM SSD architectures that can be composed, provisioned, and assigned real time to lower cloud and enterprise data centers’ total cost of ownership.”
The SSD converter controller can be attached to existing backplanes, providing ease of service and eliminating single point of failure, said Marvell. The company believes that its new controller will be implemented in low-power, high-performance Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) storage applications. Samples are available now.
Learn more about Electronic Products Magazine