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Marvell’s presence at Flash Memory Summit 2018 is highlighted by their new 88SN2400 SSD converter controller for cloud and enterprise data centers. The 88SN2400 is engineered to convert an NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) into an NVMe-oF SSD, enabling a revolutionary architecture that increases both utilization and scalability within the data center, ultimately lowering the all-important metric of total cost of ownership (TCO). This brings low-latency access over the fabric and makes the entire SSD bandwidth available to the network. This new controller supports true scalable and high-performance disaggregation of storage functions from compute functions. The 88SN2400 connects to a simple, low-power and non-compute Ethernet fabric rather than a traditional PCIe fabric, and is controlled by an enterprise-class server SoC (system-on-chip) that integrates 100GE controllers.
Data generation and consumption continues its ever-expanding growth, and data centers find themselves faced with greater complexity, increasing power consumption, and greater cooling and other associated costs in their search for greater storage capacity and bandwidth. Balancing this against underutilized storage and compute functions and typically oversubscribed storage servers, users are faced with increased capital expenditures and operating expense. Marvell’s 88SN2400 SSD converter controller provides increased flexibility to data center operators in developing their storage infrastructures, and gives them the ability to meet evolving workload demands with optimized scalable units of disaggregated flash storage and storage class memory (SCM).
According to Nigel Alvares, Marvell’s vice president of SSD and Data Center Storage Solutions, “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 they optimize the utilization, efficiency and scale of these costly resources. Our converter controller enables disruptive disaggregated NAND and SCM architectures that can be composed, provisioned and assigned real-time to lower cloud and data centers’ total cost of ownership.”
The SSD converter controller is enabling a new class of low-latency, low-power and high-performance Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) storage appliances. Looking at a typical upper-tier 2U24 rack with Gen3x4 SSDs, the 88SN2400 is able to support up to 18,000,000 (18 million!) input/output operations per second (IOPS). By pairing the 88SN2400 with a Marvell Ethernet switch that supports 2Tb/s, data center operators will have access to a 150GB/s pipe of pooled storage, and improved power consumption per I/O as compared to general purpose storage architectures. The 88SN2400 occupies a small footprint, and is able to be attached to existing backplanes, simplifying servicing and eliminating a single point of failure. Marvell anticipates designing this technology also into future Marvell SSD controllers and emerging SCM controllers.
Samples of the 88SN2400 are available now. For more information, you can visit the 88SN2400 product page here; or you can visit with Marvell through today (8/9) at Flash Memory Summit 2018 in Santa Clara, California. You will find Marvell at booth #511.