Archive for the ‘Data Center’ Category

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Scaling AI Infrastructure with High-Speed Optical Connectivity

By Suhas Nayak, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, Marvell

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), where compute performance often steals the spotlight, there’s an unsung hero working tirelessly behind the scenes. It’s something that connects the dots and propels AI platforms to new frontiers. Welcome to the realm of optical connectivity, where data transfer becomes lightning-fast and AI’s true potential is unleashed. But wait, before you dismiss the idea of optical connectivity as just another technical detail, let’s pause and reflect. Think about it: every breakthrough in AI, every mind-bending innovation, is built on the shoulders of data—massive amounts of it. And to keep up with the insatiable appetite of AI workloads, we need more than just raw compute power. We need a seamless, high-speed highway that allows data to flow freely, powering AI platforms to conquer new challenges. 

In this post, I’ll explain the importance of optical connectivity, particularly the role of DSP-based optical connectivity, in driving scalable AI platforms in the cloud. So, buckle up, get ready to embark on a journey where we unlock the true power of AI together. 

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FC-NVMe Goes Mainstream for Next-Generation Block Storage from HPE

By Todd Owens, Field Marketing Director, Marvell

While Fibre Channel (FC) has been around for a couple of decades now, the Fibre Channel industry continues to develop the technology in ways that keep it in the forefront of the data center for shared storage connectivity. Always a reliable technology, continued innovations in performance, security and manageability have made Fibre Channel I/O the go-to connectivity option for business-critical applications that leverage the most advanced shared storage arrays.

A recent development that highlights the progress and significance of Fibre Channel is Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) recent announcement of their latest offering in their Storage as a Service (SaaS) lineup with 32Gb Fibre Channel connectivity. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage MP powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware features a next-generation platform connected to the storage area network (SAN) using either traditional SCSI-based FC or NVMe over FC connectivity. This innovative solution not only provides customers with highly scalable capabilities but also delivers cloud-like management, allowing HPE customers to consume block storage any way they desire – own and manage, outsource management, or consume on demand.


HPE GreenLake for Block Storage powered by Alletra Storage MP

At launch, HPE is providing FC connectivity for this storage system to the host servers and supporting both FC-SCSI and native FC-NVMe. HPE plans to provide additional connectivity options in the future, but the fact they prioritized FC connectivity speaks volumes of the customer demand for mature, reliable, and low latency FC technology.

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Introducing Nova, a 1.6T PAM4 DSP Optimized for High-Performance Fabrics in Next-Generation AI/ML Systems

By Kevin Koski, Product Marketing Director, Marvell

Last week, Marvell introduced Nova™, its latest, fourth generation PAM4 DSP for optical modules. It features breakthrough 200G per lambda optical bandwidth, which enables the module ecosystem to bring to market 1.6 Tbps pluggable modules. You can read more about it in the press release and the product brief.

In this post, I’ll explain why the optical modules enabled by Nova are the optimal solution to high-bandwidth connectivity in artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.

Let’s begin with a look into the architecture of supercomputers, also known as high-performance computing (HPC).

Historically, HPC has been realized using large-scale computer clusters interconnected by high-speed, low-latency communications networks to act as a single computer. Such systems are found in national or university laboratories and are used to simulate complex physics and chemistry to aid groundbreaking research in areas such as nuclear fusion, climate modeling and drug discovery. They consume megawatts of power.

The introduction of graphics processing units (GPUs) has provided a more efficient way to complete specific types of computationally intensive workloads. GPUs allow for the use of massive, multi-core parallel processing, while central processing units (CPUs) execute serial processes within each core. GPUs have both improved HPC performance for scientific research purposes and enabled a machine learning (ML) renaissance of sorts. With these advances, artificial intelligence (AI) is being pursued in earnest.

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Introducing the 51.2T Teralynx 10, the Industry’s Lowest Latency Programmable Switch

By Amit Sanyal, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Marvell

If you’re one of the 100+ million monthly users of ChatGPT—or have dabbled with Google’s Bard or Microsoft’s Bing AI—you’re proof that AI has entered the mainstream consumer market.

And what’s entered the consumer mass-market will inevitably make its way to the enterprise, an even larger market for AI. There are hundreds of generative AI startups racing to make it so. And those responsible for making these AI tools accessible—cloud data center operators—are investing heavily to keep up with current and anticipated demand.

Of course, it’s not just the latest AI language models driving the coming infrastructure upgrade cycle. Operators will pay equal attention to improving general purpose cloud infrastructure too, as well as take steps to further automate and simplify operations.

Teralynx 10

To help operators meet their scaling and efficiency objectives, today Marvell introduces Teralynx® 10, a 51.2 Tbps programmable 5nm monolithic switch chip designed to address the operator bandwidth explosion while meeting stringent power- and cost-per-bit requirements. It’s intended for leaf and spine applications in next-generation data center networks, as well as AI/ML and high-performance computing (HPC) fabrics.

A single Teralynx 10 replaces twelve of the 12.8 Tbps generation, the last to see widespread deployment. The resulting savings are impressive: 80% power reduction for equivalent capacity.

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Marvell and Aviz Networks Collaborate to Drive SONiC Deployment in Cloud and Enterprise Data Centers

By Kant Deshpande, Director, Product Management, Marvell

Disaggregation is the future
Disaggregation—the decoupling of hardware and software—is arguably the future of networking. Disaggregation lets customers select best-of-breed hardware and software, enabling rapid innovation by separating the hardware and software development paths.

Disaggregation started with server virtualization and is being adapted to storage and networking technology. In networking, disaggregation promises that any networking operating system (NOS) can be integrated with any switch silicon. Open source-standards like ONIE allow a networking switch to load and install any NOS during the boot process.

SONiC: the Linux of networking OS
Software for Open Networking in Cloud (SONiC) has been gaining momentum as the preferred open-source cloud-scale network operating system (NOS).

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of organizations that operate large data center networks (greater than 200 switches) will run SONiC in a production environment.[i] According to Gartner, due to readily expanding customer interest and a commercial ecosystem, there is a strong possibility SONiC will become analogous to Linux for networking operating systems in next three to six years.

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