Marvell today announced the first NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) SSD converter controller, the 88SN2400 designed and optimized to convert an NVMe SSD into an NVMe-oF SSD.

By bringing low latency access over the fabric and exposing the entire SSD bandwidth to the network, the Marvell controller supports scalable, high-performance disaggregation of storage from compute. The 88SN2400 utilizes a 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.

The SSD converter controller is powering a class of low-power, low-latency and high-performance Ethernet bunch of flash (EBOF) storage appliances. In a typical high-end 2U24 shelf with Gen3x4 SSDs, the 88SN2400 can support up to 18M input/output operations per second (IOPS). Utilizing a Marvell Ethernet switch that supports 2Tb/s and the Marvell 88SN2400, data center operators will be able to benefit from a 150GB/s pipe of pooled storage, and better power consumption per IO compared to general purpose architectures. The SSD converter controller is optimized for a small footprint and can be attached to existing backplanes providing ease of service and eliminating single point of failure. The technology can also be designed into future Marvell SSD and emerging SCM controllers.