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Marvell, a world-leading producer of storage, cloud infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), multimedia and connectivity semiconductor devices, is announcing the Marvell 88RC13XX family of high-performance RAID storage controllers. This new series has a full set of features that include eight 6Gb/s SATA ports, four lanes of PCI Express 3.0 and a 10Gb/s USB 3.1 device port with type-C connector support. This new family of controllers consists of a high-performance AHCI RAID on chip (ROC), an innovative NVMe ROC, a DRAM-less input/output (I/O) processor with HW RAID 0/1/10, and a cost-effective I/O controller. These new products are geared to a number of markets that include cloud infrastructure, enterprise storage arrays, networked video surveillance, SATA Host Bus Adaptors (HBA), directly-attached external USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt-3 storage (DAS), and entry-level to mid-range servers.
Marvell’s new 88RC13XX family integrates an efficient dual core Cortex®-R5 CPU complex to offload RAID functions from the host processor, while minimizing latencies and maximizing storage performance. With both AHCI and NVMe options for the host interface, Marvell provides the ability to maintain legacy SW compatibility, while also providing a seamless migration path to NVMe storage connectivity to enable superior performance. By integrating enclosure management functionalities and a generous number of general purpose I/O pins, systems designers can dramatically reduce total system cost. The ability to act as a boot device fully compatible with default OS drivers makes the 88RC13XX family a highly versatile series of products.
According to Pantelis Alexopoulos, Interim Co-Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice President of the Storage Business Group at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc., “With this latest product offering, Marvell leveraged customer feedback and the company’s long-term leadership and experience in storage to deliver flexible, high-performance, yet efficient and low power storage controllers. Marvell’s family of 88RC13XX controllers further supports our mission to develop comprehensive storage solutions that address a wide variety of platforms and applications across client, enterprise and cloud infrastructure markets.”
The 88RC13XX controllers are also compatible with existing port multipliers, including Marvell’s 88SM97XX product series, which were the industry’s first 6Gb/s SATA port multipliers. The 88RC13XX product family includes:
- 88RC1348 AHCI ROC with USB 3.1, RAID 0/1/5/6/10, dual Cortex R5 processor
- 88RC1368 NVMe ROC with USB 3.1, RAID 0/1/5/6/10, dual Cortex R5 processor
- 88RC1328 I/O Processor with USB 3.1, RAID 0/1/10, dual Cortex R5 processor
- 88SE1337 I/O Controller
Key features of the Marvell 88RC13XX family of controllers include:
- 8 x 6Gb/s SATA ports
- 4 x PCIe 3.0 lanes
- USB 3.1 port
- Dual Cortex-R5 600MHz on-chip processors
- Hardware RAID 0/1/5/6/10
- Port multiplier support
- Support for up to 40 GPIO pins
- SPI interface for external Option ROM (legacy or uEFI) bootable controller support
Marvell’s latest RAID controller family will be demonstrated at Computex 2016 in Taipei through June 3rd. The AHCI ROC is currently sampling with select Marvell customers; and the other products have anticipated availability in 2017. You can view the 88RC13XX product page here; and the Marvell press release announcing these latest offerings in its entirety here.