Marvell unveils NVMe-oF SSD converter controller

1 min read

Marvell has announced the industry’s first NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) SSD converter controller, the 88SN2400, for cloud and enterprise data centres.

The 88SN2400 controller has been designed to convert an NVMe SSD into an NVMe-oF SSD, providing what the company calls a ‘revolutionary architecture’ that will increase the utilisation and scalability of SSDs within the data centre and that will help to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).

By bringing low latency access over the fabric and exposing the entire SSD bandwidth to the network, the controller supports scalable, high-performance disaggregation of storage from compute. The 88SN2400 uses a simple, low-power and compute-less Ethernet fabric instead of a traditional PCIe fabric controlled and managed by an enterprise-class server SoC with integrated 100GE controllers.

Data centres are having to grapple with the issue of increasing power consumption, complexity, and costs associated with the demand for greater storage bandwidth and capacity.

The Marvell SSD converter controller will allow greater flexibility for data centre operators and designers to develop infrastructures to meet evolving workload demands with scalable units of disaggregated flash storage and storage class memory (SCM).

“As cloud and enterprise data centres 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 optimise the utilisation, efficiency and scale of these costly resources,” said 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 the total cost of ownership.”