Alongside the announcement that Marvell was working with OCZ on their new Z-Drive R5, Marvell announced their new scalable 88NV9145 controller which interacts directly PCIe-interface without an additional RAID controller. The 88NV9145 is aimed at PCIe SSD solutions, spanning from two-controller entry-level models to sixteen-controller high-end enterprise models scalaing directly with other 88NV9145 controllers around it. With integral RAID abilities, this opens the door for incredibly fast storage solutions without relying on off-loading wear leveling or RAID functions to the CPU.
Alongside the announcement that Marvell was working with OCZ on their new Z-Drive R5, Marvell announced their new scalable 88NV9145 controller which interacts directly PCIe-interface without an additional RAID controller. The 88NV9145 is aimed at PCIe SSD solutions, spanning from two-controller entry-level models to sixteen-controller high-end enterprise models scalaing directly with other 88NV9145 controllers around it. With integral RAID abilities, this opens the door for incredibly fast storage solutions without relying on off-loading wear leveling or RAID functions to the CPU.
As shown in the picture below, each controller links together, and then passes off information through a PCIe-switch, interacting with the other controllers around it and the PCIe-bus automatically without an overall device-level controller. This reduces latency, improves performance, and decreases the CPU load on the host system.
A reference layout that Marvell provided shows a PCIe-solution using eight of these new controllers linked through a PLC PCIe-switch.
At the single controller level, each 88NV9145 supports up to 64GB ot SLC NAND or 128GB of MLC NAND, offering speeds up to 70K IOPS 4K random write and up to 93K IOPS 4K random read. The controller as a four-channel NAND interface, supporting ONFI 2.2 flash for up to 200MB/s per channel. When scaled up, performance scales linerally, topping at 1,400,000 IOPS random read and 1,040,000 IOPS random write with sixteen controllers linked. Performance nearly doubles as each new controller is added into the matrix.
