Solid state storage continues to flourish, larger capacity, higher performance has been unable to meet the pursuit of manufacturers, a variety of alternative SSD is also emerging in endlessly. At FMS 2019, Toshiba and Marvell jointly demonstrated a SSD that can be directly connected to the Internet.
In fact, at last year’s FMS Summit, Marvell announced an NVME-Ethernet converter that allows an NVME SSD to connect directly to the Ethernet network and access it via NVMEOF (NVME over Fabric), but it was still a prototype. The converter is placed between a standard U.2 SSD and an Ethernet backboard.
This year, Marvell and Toshiba demonstrated a fully integrated Ethernet SSD with a Marvell 88SN2400 converter inside, making it look like a regular 2.5-inch U.2 or U.3 SSD, but in fact, instead of four PCIe channels, there were two 25GB Ethernet connections.
Toshiba says the new model is ready for production, and has laid out an Aupera 2U Ethernet JBOF with 24 of these internet-enabled SSDs inside, combined with a Marvell Ethernet switching ASIC.
In a traditional design, a typical NVME JBOF either uses a PCIe switch, an external PCIe cable to connect to a nearby server, or uses one or two x86 server processors, some PCIe switches, and some RDMA Ethernet cards to support NVMEOF, which is quite complicated.
News source: Fast Tech