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Marvell Launches DragonFly PCIe Platform and Partners with SanDisk

At the Flash Memory Summit underway this week, Marvell announced the availability of its DragonFly platform for servers and storage, and a partnership with SanDisk to collaborate on a new generation of microservers for enterprise cloud storage.

At the Flash Memory Summit underway this week in Santa Clara Marvell (MRVL) announced the availability of  its PCIe-based DragonFly platform for servers and storage, and a partnership with SanDisk to collaborate on a new generation of microservers for enterprise cloud storage.

DragonFly Platform

Marvell's DragonFly platform, featuring DragonFly NVRAM and DragonFly NVCACE is now available. Launched as the industry's first intelligent NVRAM SSD accelerator, the NVRAM SSD acts like a low-latency write-back cache running embedded software in a PCIe adapter form factor. Designed from the ground up, the DragonFly platform is a fully integrated enterprise adapter solution that leverages Marvell chip technology and delivers the highest IOPS and lowest latency performance on the most consistent basis. DragonFly is sold as a PCIe Gen2 x8 adapter with up to 8GB SODIMM ECC DRAM and up to 1.5 TB of external SSD storage. Features include: read, write-back and write-thru caching, synchronous low-latency peer-to-peer write-back mirroring, virtual machine migration and management tools, 3.2GB/s throughput and less than 22 micro-second latency.

“It’s now clear that DragonFly is ready for prime-time and can support the rigorous demands of enterprise-class data centers,” said Alan Armstrong, vice president of Marketing for the Storage Business Group at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. “DragonFly is the ideal platform for virtualized and bare-metal server applications in public and private cloud computing environments. DragonFly offers an amazing hardware-based I/O acceleration technology that not only reduces complexity, but also dramatically scales virtualized server and database/NoSQL server performance while lowering the capital spending costs for network attached storage/storage area networks (NAS/SAN) and local direct attached storage (DAS).”

DragonFly NVCACHE addresses the accelerating IOPS pain occurring in public and enterprise cloud computing. An industry-standard PCIe adapter, DragonFly NVCACHE fits into commercially available rack-mount servers. Since it operates independent of the host server, it requires only a thin kernel driver, and offers pervasive OS support and near-zero usage of host resources.

Marvell and SanDisk Collaborate

Marvell and SanDisk announced their collaboration on a new generation of microservers for enterprise cloud storage. A combined solution takes Marvell’s ARM reference design with SanDisk’s SATA SSD modules, for a low power solution with extreme spatial efficiency for I/O intensive environments.

“SanDisk is pleased to partner with Marvell in the storage microserver market,” said Kevin Conley, senior vice president and general manager, Client Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “Our collaboration underscores both companies’ commitment on delivering low power server solutions that are helping fuel the demand for SSD-based storage in this fast growing market.”

SanDisk’s SATA X100 SSDs used in the Marvell solution are high-speed, energy-efficient data storage products that have an advanced solid state architecture and ability to achieve high data speeds.  SanDisk’s X100 SSDs offer a 6 Gbit/s SATA interface and achieve read and write speeds of up to 500 MB/s and 430 MB/s respectively.

“For Marvell, collaborating with SanDisk is an opportunity to bring to market the very best combination of ARM and SSD technologies as they relate to enterprise storage,” said Ted Weatherford, senior director and product line manager, Cloud Services and Infrastructure (CSI) Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. “What’s more, we’ve created a new generation of microservers that significantly outpaces competing attempts at speed, efficiency and, most importantly, scalability. To the extent that enterprises need to support an increasing number of machines and devices – inside and outside the office in a 24/7, global capacity – Marvell and SanDisk deliver a comprehensively connected lifestyle in a simple and powerful package.”

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