Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category

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Software-Defined Networking for the Software-Defined Vehicle

By Amir Bar-Niv, VP of Marketing, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell

and John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer, Sonatus

and Simon Edelhaus, VP SW, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell

The software-defined vehicle (SDV) is one of the newest and most interesting megatrends in the automotive industry. As we discussed in a previous blog, the reason that this new architectural—and business—model will be successful is the advantages it offers to all stakeholders:

  • The OEMs (car manufacturers) will gain new revenue streams from aftermarket services and new applications;
  • The car owners will easily upgrade their vehicle features and functions; and
  • The mobile operators will profit from increased vehicle data consumption driven by new applications.

What is a software-defined vehicle? While there is no official definition, the term reflects the change in the way software is being used in vehicle design to enable flexibility and extensibility. To better understand the software-defined vehicle, it helps to first examine the current approach.

Today’s embedded control units (ECUs) that manage car functions do include software, however, the software in each ECU is often incompatible with and isolated from other modules. When updates are required, the vehicle owner must visit the dealer service center, which inconveniences the owner and is costly for the manufacturer.

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A Marvell-ous Hack Indeed – Winning the Hearts of SONiC Users

By Kishore Atreya, Director of Product Management, Marvell

Recently the Linux Foundation hosted its annual ONE Summit for open networking, edge projects and solutions. For the first time, this year’s event included a “mini-summit” for SONiC, an open source networking operating system targeted for data center applications that’s been widely adopted by cloud customers. A variety of industry members gave presentations, including Marvell’s very own Vijay Vyas Mohan, who presented on the topic of Extensible Platform Serdes Libraries. In addition, the SONiC mini-summit included a hackathon to motivate users and developers to innovate new ways to solve customer problems. 

So, what could we hack?

At Marvell, we believe that SONiC has utility not only for the data center, but to enable solutions that span from edge to cloud. Because it’s a data center NOS, SONiC is not optimized for edge use cases. It requires an expensive bill of materials to run, including a powerful CPU, a minimum of 8 to 16GB DDR, and an SSD. In the data center environment, these HW resources contribute less to the BOM cost than do the optics and switch ASIC. However, for edge use cases with 1G to 10G interfaces, the cost of the processor complex, primarily driven by the NOS, can be a much more significant contributor to overall system cost. For edge disaggregation with SONiC to be viable, the hardware cost needs to be comparable to that of a typical OEM-based solution. Today, that’s not possible.

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The Tasting Notes for 64G Fibre Channel

By Nishant Lodha, Director of Product Marketing – Emerging Technologies, Marvell

While age is just a number and so is new speed for Fibre Channel (FC), the number itself is often irrelevant and it’s the maturity that matters – kind of like a bottle of wine! Today as we make a toast to the data center and pop open (announce) the Marvell® QLogic® 2870 Series 64G Fibre Channel HBAs, take a glass and sip into its maturity to find notes of trust and reliability alongside of operational simplicity, in-depth visibility, and consistent performance.

Big words on the label? I will let you be the sommelier as you work through your glass and my writings.

Marvell QLogic 2870 series 64GFC HBAs
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The Evolution of Cloud Storage and Memory

By Gary Kotzur, CTO, Storage Products Group, Marvell

and Jon Haswell, SVP, Firmware, Marvell

The nature of storage is changing much more rapidly than it ever has historically. This evolution is being driven by expanding amounts of enterprise data and the inexorable need for greater flexibility and scale to meet ever-higher performance demands.

If you look back 10 or 20 years, there used to be a one-size-fits-all approach to storage. Today, however, there is the public cloud, the private cloud, and the hybrid cloud, which is a combination of both. All these clouds have different storage and infrastructure requirements. What’s more, the data center infrastructure of every hyperscaler and cloud provider is architecturally different and is moving towards a more composable architecture. All of this is driving the need for highly customized cloud storage solutions as well as demanding the need for a comparable solution in the memory domain.

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SONiC: It’s Not Just for Switches Anymore

By Amit Sanyal, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Marvell

SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) has steadily gained momentum as a cloud-scale network operating system (NOS) by offering a community-driven approach to NOS innovation. In fact, 650 Group predicts that revenue for SONiC hardware, controllers and OSs will grow from around US$2 billion today to around US$4.5 billion by 2025. 

Those using it know that the SONiC open-source framework shortens software development cycles; and SONiC’s Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) provides ease of porting and a homogeneous edge-to-cloud experience for data center operators. It also speeds time-to-market for OEMs bringing new systems to the market.

The bottom line: more choice is good when it comes to building disaggregated networking hardware optimized for the cloud. Over recent years, SONiC-using cloud customers have benefited from consistent user experience, unified automation, and software portability across switch platforms, at scale.

As the utility of SONiC has become evident, other applications are lining up to benefit from this open-source ecosystem.

A SONiC Buffet: Extending SONiC to Storage

SONiC capabilities in Marvell’s cloud-optimized switch silicon include high availability (HA) features, RDMA over converged ethernet (RoCE), low latency, and advanced telemetry. All these features are required to run robust storage networks.

Here’s one use case: EBOF. The capabilities above form the foundation of Marvell’s Ethernet-Bunch-of-Flash (EBOF) storage architecture. The new EBOF architecture addresses the non-storage bottlenecks that constrain the performance of the traditional Just-a-Bunch-of-Flash (JBOF) architecture it replaces-by disaggregating storage from compute.

EBOF architecture replaces the bottleneck components found in JBOF – CPUs, DRAM and SmartNICs – with an Ethernet switch, and it’s here that SONiC is added to the plate. Marvell has, for the first time, applied SONiC to storage, specifically for services enablement, including the NVMeoFTM (NVM Express over Fabrics) discovery controller, and out-of-band management for EBOF, using Redfish® management. This implementation is in production today on the Ingrasys ES2000 EBOF storage solution. (For more on this topic, check out this, this, and this.)

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