Solutions address emerging data centre SSD requirements

The proliferation of cloud services and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, is driving various workloads in the data centre. These evolving and expanding workloads can have differing storage requirements that emerging SSD form factors are targeted to address.

Marvell has developed innovative NVMe chipsets capable of powering the larger Enterprise Data Storage Form Factors (EDSFF), Next Generation Small Form Factors (NGSFF) and various customised form factors, providing the ability to increase storage capacity, performance and overall workload efficiencies.

The Marvell 88NR2241 intelligent NVMe switch allows data centres to aggregate and manage resources between multiple NVMe SSD controllers and workload-offload accelerators.

The switch enhances multi-tenant, virtualised cloud and enterprise data centre environments by offering high quality of service and predictable storage performance using integrated virtual functions.

The 88NR2241 can provide up to 6.4 GB/s of throughput and up to 1.6M random input output per second (IOPS), thereby enabling the industry’s most flexible SSD architecture for optimal workload efficiencies around power, performance and cost.

The 88SS1098 and 88SS1088 are Marvell’s latest PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe SSD controllers supporting single and dual port functionality, the NVMe 1.3 standard, and open channel architectures.

Both controllers are powered by Marvell’s fourth generation of NANDEdge LDPC error correction technology, which provides support for the latest 3D NAND TLC and QLC technologies, extending SSD lifetime while maintaining best-in-class latency and performance consistency.

These controllers leverage Marvell’s highly advanced and proven system-on-chip (SoC) processor architectures to enable up to 3.6 GB/s of throughput and up to 800k of random read IOPS, supporting up to 16 NAND channels and 16 GB DRAM.

These Marvell chipsets can support up to industry-leading 32 TB capacities, allowing support of a full range of cloud and enterprise SSD solutions - including M.2, NGSFF, U.2, PCIe add-in-cards, EDSFF and custom-built.

The chipset architectures present data centre storage architects with new building blocks through which to innovate and optimise their cloud services and workloads with emerging memories, offload accelerators and new data centre infrastructure architectures.

Nigel Alvares, vice president of SSD and Data centre Storage Solutions at Marvell, said, “Cloud and enterprise data centres are increasingly highly-virtualised, multi-tenant environments supporting a growing number of different workloads with varying storage requirements".

"To help data centre operators address and scale while not compromising quality of service, Marvell has built upon its storage technology expertise to develop industry-first NVMe chipsets that will deliver new scalable SSD architecture solutions optimised for data centre workloads.”

“The cloud and enterprise data centre SSD segments are experiencing rapid growth, with NVMe-based SSDs forecast to expand at a CAGR of 42% out to 2022,” said Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights.

“Marvell’s innovative NVMe chipset solutions are well-positioned to capitalise on this growth trend and address emerging requirements with best-in-class building blocks for data centre scale and efficiencies.”

“LITEON and Marvell have a long history of collaborating to deliver innovative SSD storage solutions, such as the new NVRAM Hybrid drive that we announced at OCP 2018,” said Darlo Perez, managing director, Americas Region, Storage Strategic Business Group at LITEON.

“This latest SSD is a great example of how Marvell’s NVMe chipsets and LITEON’s storage system expertise are coming together to help customers address emerging cloud and data centre challenges.”

“Marvell and Toshiba Memory Corporation have a long-standing relationship to enable emerging SSD solutions,” said Hiroo Ohta, technology executive at Toshiba Memory Corporation. “As NAND technologies scale, Marvell’s NANDEdge technology and associated chipsets will be key solutions to address the latest data centre SSD workload requirements.”

Marvell is showcasing its new NVMe chipset solutions for data centre SSDs at the OCP U.S. Summit 2018 in San Jose, Calif. from 20th to 21st March. Nigel Alvares will present during an Executive Track session at the Summit, “Using ‘Open’ Building Blocks to Enable Emerging SSD Form Factors” on the 20th March at 2:35 p.m.