Marvell With Native NVMe RAID-1 PCIe Accelerator Card

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. introduced a native NVMe RAID-1 accelerator, a technology for virtualized, multi-tenant cloud and enterprise data center environments which demand optimized reliability, efficiency, and performance.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is the first of the company’s partners to support the accelerator in the HPE NS204i-p NVMe OS Boot Device offered on select ProLiant servers and Apollo systems.

As the industry transitions from legacy SAS and SATA to NVMe SSDs, the company’s offering helps data centers fast-track the move to higher performance flash storage. This accelerator lowers data center TCO by offloading RAID-1 processing from costly and precious server CPU resources, maximizing application processing performance. IT organizations can now deploy a plug-and-play, NVMe-based OS boot solution, like the HPE NS204i-p NVMe OS boot device, that protects the integrity of flash storage while delivering an optimized, application-level user experience.

The NVMe RAID-1 accelerator is compatible with Windows, Linux and VMware native OS NVMe host drivers and is based on a DRAM-less architecture which lowers power consumption. It is for enterprise SSD boot applications as it provides OS and recovery data protection that is physically isolated in the server from volume user data. This isolation is critical for virtualized, SDS and HCI deployments that demand reliable access to logs and boot programs with no chance of being corrupted by user data. To meet HA requirements, OSs like VMware ESXi have traditionally relied on taxing the CPU for RAID-1 processing across 2 separate drives, consuming 2 server storage bays. The NVMe RAID-1 accelerator in the NS204i-p NVMe OS Boot Device solves this problem by offloading RAID-1 processing to hardware and directly connecting to 2 NVMe SSDs allowing the HPE solution to consume a single PCIe slot.

“We are delighted to bring the industry’s first hardware-accelerated, native NVMe RAID-1 to volume production togeter with the HPE NS204i-p NVMe OS Boot Device,” said Thad Omura, VP, marketing, flash business unit. “HPE is the first to bring reliable, self-contained NVMe OS boot capability to end users thanks to our RAID-1 offering that is easily deployed in volume with native OS NVMe host driver compatibility.“

HPE has implemented a customized version of the NVMe RAID-1 accelerator and is the first to offer enterprise and hybrid-cloud providers this OS boot solution as part of its server infrastructure offering. The NS204i-p NVMe OS Boot Device is a single PCIe card that includes two 480GB NVMe M.2 SSDs and enables customers to mirror their OS through 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 OSs for deployment on ProLiant servers and Apollo systems.

“HPE has a decades-long collaboration with Marvell in delivering joint solutions that optimize storage, server and networking technologies to help customers transform their data centers and target growing workload needs,” said Krista Satterthwaite, VP, compute product management, HPE. “We look forward to continuing this collaboration by being the first to support Marvell’s new accelerator solution in our state-of-the-art NVMe OS Boot Device, which is offered on the HPE ProLiant servers and HPE Apollo systems to target a range of workloads such as virtualization, AI, analytics, HPC, and HCI.“

The HPE NS204i-p NVMe OS Boot Device is available for select ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus servers and Apollo Gen10 and Gen10 Plus systems.

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