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Marvell builds gateway to the clouds

DragonFly caching HBA

Performance

As well as the highlight on a 10 X increase in server storage I/O, Marvell says DragonFly offers a maximum 200,000 4K block random writes and reads; the read number requiring a 100 per cent hit rate in the maximum read cache. It has a 3GB/sec capability for 256KB block writes and reads.

Marvell DragonFly VSA uncased

Marvell DragonFly with casing removed.

It seems intuitively obvious that overall system performance though will depend upon the amount and type of the SSDs installed in the host server along with the DragonFly card.

There is a supercapacitor to safeguard cache contents in the case of power failure and one DragonFly can be a synchronous mirror of another to provide high availability.

Marvell claims DragonFly represents an entirely new architecture in the industry, and is a good fit to cloud service provider requirements, as the embedded DragonFly processors put almost no load on host servers and enable storage arrays to handle many more virtual machines accessing their resources than otherwise.

Beta testing will start in the third quarter and general availability should commence by year-end. A DragonFly should cost about the same as a high-end host bus adaptor. ®

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