Marvell

With the proliferation of mobile devices—smartphones, tablets, netbooks—consumers are reaping the benefits of an "always on" lifestyle. To meet these growing demands and cut infrastructure costs, public and enterprise clouds are increasingly using virtual machines (VMs) to consolidate applications onto fewer servers. But in solving this challenge, virtualization has inadvertently created another: NAS/SAN arrays cannot keep up with the flood of random write and read I/O requests, resulting in a storage server bottleneck.

Marvell tackles this problem head-on with a revolutionary turnkey solution: the DragonFly Virtual Storage Accelerator (VSA). Designed to cost-effectively break the I/O barrier in public and enterprise cloud computing environments, Marvell DragonFly is a cloud computing I/O acceleration adapter that enables incrementally scalable virtualization while significantly reducing storage costs.

Key Benefits

• Yields 10x higher virtual machine I/O per second while lowering storage disk and CPU overhead by more than 50%.
• Enables automatic write/read caching in application servers on its way to and from higher latency, higher capacity shared storage.
• Designed as a turnkey "appliance-on-a-card" that fits seamlessly into all commercially available rack-mount servers and is operating-system independent.
• Enables a cost-effective distributed cache that incrementally scales IOPS and NVRAM/SSD capacity as your application servers grow over time.

Marvell Embedded Cache Technology

At the heart of DragonFly's innovative architecture is Marvell's embedded cache technology, combining sophisticated software and hardware-assist engines running inside purpose-built SoCs (system-on-chips).

Completely independent of host server resources, the embedded cache technology requires only a very thin kernel driver. All major operating systems and hypervisors are supported, for quick and easy porting of new releases and patches. And DragonFly fully implements the cache technology in the VSA hardware, resulting in near-zero usage of host server resources.

Block Diagram

Applications

The industry's first virtual storage accelerator, Marvell's DragonFly is a revolutionary solution for enterprise-class cloud computing. Featuring the unique DragonFly embedded cache technology, DragonFly promises to break the I/O barrier in cloud computing environments, while cutting costs. DragonFly is targeted at managed hosting and telecom service providers who offer public cloud solutions, as well as private clouds such as enterprise data centers at Fortune 1,000 companies.