Marvell introduces the industry's first native NVMe RAID accelerator

     Marvell has introduced the industry's first native NVMe RAID 1 accelerator, a state-of-the-art technology for virtualization, multi-tenant cloud and enterprise data center environments that optimizes reliability, efficiency and performance. HP Enterprise (HPE) is Marvell's first partner to support the new accelerator in selected HPE ProLiant servers and HPE NS204i-P NVMe OS boot devices for the HPE Apollo system.

     As the industry transitions from traditional SAS and SATA to NVMe SSDS, Marvell's products help the data center quickly move to higher performance flash storage. The innovative accelerator reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the data center by offloading RAID 1 processing from expensive and scarce server CPU resources to maximize application processing performance. IT organizations can now deploy NVME-based "plug and play" OS boot solutions such as the HPE NS204i-P NVMe OS Boot Device, which can provide an optimized application-level user experience while ensuring the integrity of flash data storage.

     NVMe RAID 1 accelerators are compatible with Windows, Linux, and VMware native OS NVMe host drivers and are based on a DRAM free architecture that reduces power consumption. NVMe RAID 1 accelerators are ideal for enterprise-class SSD boot applications, easily providing the operating system and protection mechanisms to recover data, physically isolating it from large amounts of user data in the server. This isolation is critical for virtualization, software-defined storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments; These deployments require reliable access logs and bootstraps to protect against user data corruption.

     In order to meet high availability requirements, operating systems such as VMware ESXi often rely on increased CPU load and occupy two server storage slots to achieve RAID 1 processing on two separate drives. The NVMe RAID 1 accelerator in the HPE NS204i-p NVMe OS boot device solves this problem by offloading RAID 1 processing to the hardware and connecting directly to the two NVMe SSDS, allowing the HPE solution to occupy only one PCIe slot.

     Tad Omura, vice president of marketing for Marvell's Flash memory business, said: "We are excited to bring the industry's first hardware-accelerated native NVMe RAID 1 into volume production with the HPE NS204i-P NVMe OS boot device. With our RAID 1 products featuring native OS NVMe host driver compatibility and easy batch deployment, HPE is the first company to provide end users with reliable, independent NVMe OS boot capabilities."

     HPE has adopted a customized version of the NVMe RAID 1 accelerator and is the first company to offer this OS startup solution for enterprise and hybrid cloud providers in its server infrastructure offerings. The HPE NS204i-P NVMe OS boot device is a single PCIe card with two 480GB NVMe M.2 SSDS that enable customers to implement OS mirroring operations with dedicated hardware RAID 1. This "plug and play" OS boot device also has native OS NVMe host driver support for VMware, Windows, RHEL, and SLES operating systems, and can be easily deployed on HPE ProLiant servers and HPE Apollo systems.

     Krista Satterthwaite, vice president of Computing product Management at HPE, said: "HPE and Marvell have worked together for decades to deliver joint solutions that optimize storage, server and networking technologies to help customers transform their data centers and meet growing workload demands. We look forward to continuing this great relationship and being the first to support Marvell's new accelerator solution in our top-notch NVMe OS startup devices, Available on HPE ProLiant servers and HPE Apollo systems for a variety of workloads such as virtualization, AI, analytics, HPC and HCI."

     The HPE NS204i-P NVMe OS boot device is available now for select HPE ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus servers as well as HPE Apollo Gen10 and Gen10 Plus systems.Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at ESG, said: "Marvell's approach to designing hardware-optimized NVMe RAID 1 accelerators achieves an incredible level of optimisation, with better performance and lower power consumption compared to existing SATA/SAS RAID products. This NVMe RAID 1 accelerator should be the first choice for mission-critical data centers, primarily in clustered architectures such as HCI, where high availability and fast data recovery are required."