Marvell Bravera SSD Controllers Enable Top-Performance Data Center Flash Solutions

Industry's first PCIe 5.0 SSD controller provides architectural flexibility, security and data protection for optimal cloud infrastructure

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (June 10, 2021) – Marvell today announced the launch of its new Bravera™ SC5 controller family, delivering unprecedented performance, best-in-class efficiency and leading security features to address the ever-expanding workloads of cloud computing. Cloud data centers need to process large amounts of data, which has increased the demand for faster, higher-bandwidth storage in these environments. Marvell’s Bravera SC5 SSD controller meets the key requirements of scalable containerized cloud storage infrastructure. By enabling the highest performance flash solutions, Marvell controllers will become data center infrastructure, providing ultra-low latency real-time applications and cost-optimized cloud-scale capacity.

The Marvell Bravera SC5 is the industry’s first SSD controller to support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 1.4b, doubling the performance of PCIe 4.0 SSD controllers. This helps accelerate workloads and reduce latency, greatly improving the user experience. To meet the stringent security requirements of cloud service providers5 and ensure user data is protected, these controllers offer a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)-compliant root of trust (RoT), AES 256-bit encryption, and multi-key revocation capabilities. These new controllers are the first to feature a hardware-based elastic and flexible service level agreement (SLA) enforcer that ensures quality of service (QoS) and provides metering capabilities for individual customers to improve overall storage efficiency and utilization while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

"The Bravera SC5 SSD controller is first to market with innovative data center features, extending Marvell's flash technology leadership," said Thad Omura, vice president of marketing for Marvell's Flash Business Unit. "We are working with the entire ecosystem to enable SSD vendors and self-service cloud providers to deploy the most advanced flash solutions."

The next generation of cloud data center server architectures will continue to expand different standard sizes, NAND types, and performance standards, covering a variety of different physical standard sizes, temperatures, and signal integrity requirements. As workloads continue to increase, Marvell's latest SSD controller family provides a high degree of customizability to meet the various storage options required for cloud computing. The new controller implements the world's first EDSFF E1.S standard size storage device, supporting up to 16 NAND channels while providing unlimited performance. In addition, the Bravera SC5 series complies with the Open Compute Project (OCP) NVMe SSD specification, providing a standardized path for integration and testing.

In developing the Bravera SSD controller product line, Marvell worked closely with leading hyperscale cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure to ensure overall solution compatibility and data center SSD standardization in the open hardware space.

“We would like to congratulate Marvell for being first to market with the new Bravera SC5 SSD controller,” said Pablo Ziperovich, general manager of Microsoft Azure Memory and Storage Center of Excellence. “Marvell’s latest SSD controller delivers Open Compute Project compliance, power efficiency, performance and functionality that are critical to Microsoft Azure’s extreme requirements.”

"Data centers face many technical challenges. These include the need for PCIe 5.0 for performance scaling, E1.S for density and serviceability, and the need for Open Compute Project data center NVMe SSD support product features. Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controller family supports the technology that enables the next generation of hyperscale SSDs," said Ross Stenfort, hardware system architect for Facebook's storage division.

Marvell's new SSD controller series leverages the company's advanced and mature system-on-chip (SoC) architecture to achieve up to 14GB/s throughput and 2 million random reads per second. By providing customers with the ability to reuse the same firmware stack across their entire product offering, Marvell SSD controllers enable customers to quickly go to market with multiple product design (SKU) requirements. In addition, the Bravera SC5 SSD controller is the industry's first flash controller that supports multiple usage modes such as SEF (software-enabled flash), ZNS (partitioned namespace), open Channel, etc., without changing hardware. When upgrading to the next generation of product designs, the same hardware architecture can be seamlessly reused to ensure SSD system design flexibility.

“Software Enabled Flash (SEF) is an open source software-defined API architecture that redefines how SSDs are used in the cloud. We are excited to develop an ecosystem of products supporting SEF with the introduction of Marvell’s new Bravera SC5 SSD controller products,” said Eric Ries, senior vice president of memory and storage strategy at Kioxia America. “These products enable solutions that meet the growing extreme workload requirements of critical cloud workloads.”

The new controller uses Marvell's fifth-generation NANDEdge™ low-density parity-check (LDPC) error correction technology and supports the latest 3D NAND QLC, TLC and SLC technologies from various manufacturers in the market, extending the life of the SSD and achieving best-in-class power-performance ratio.

Broad Ecosystem: “AMD EPYC™ processors are powering some of the most compute-intensive workloads in the cloud, where leading CPU performance, security and scalability are critical,” said Raghu Nambiar, vice president of Datacenter Ecosystem and Application Engineering at AMD. “We believe supporting the ecosystem and working with key partners like Marvell can help enable the latest industry standards for the modern data center. We congratulate Marvell on the launch of the Bravera SC5 SSD controller and are excited to continue our collaboration with Marvell.”

"Marvell's new Bravera SC5 SSD controller is a great example of the innovation and momentum that occurs when ecosystems unite around open industry standards," said Jim Pappas, director of technical programs at Intel. "PCIe 5.0 and the high-performance products designed for it will help unleash the full potential of the next generation of Sapphire Rapids Intel Xeon Scalable processors in a variety of applications."

"Marvell and KIOXIA have a well-established relationship that has been successful from consumer to data center applications," said Atsushi Inoue, senior director of the Memory Business Unit at KIOXIA. "We believe that the Marvell Bravera SC5 ultra-low latency SSD controller, together with our BiCS Flash™, can open up new opportunities in the expanding cloud storage market for our mutual customers."

“Renesas and Marvell have collaborated to develop the world’s first PCIe 5.0 SSD reference design,” said Andrew Cowell, Vice President of Power Delivery Business Unit at Renesas Mobile/Infrastructure/IoT. “Our intelligent power management products are highly efficient in a highly integrated small-area printed circuit board (PCB) solution that meets the low-profile requirements of the next generation of SSD form factors. Marvell’s Bravera SC5 SSD controller and Renesas’ power management IC are co-optimized to meet the demanding requirements of modern cloud data centers.” “We are excited to enable the next generation of SK hynix NAND devices with Marvell’s new Bravera SC5 SSD controller and congratulate Marvell on bringing the first PCIe 5.0 SSD controller to market,” said Jin Lim, Vice President of SK hynix. “Marvell’s latest family of SSD controllers are optimized to meet the critical power and performance requirements of cloud data centers with a faster time to market.”

"Marvell's new Bravera SC5 series SSD controller is a milestone product in enabling the next generation of cloud storage infrastructure," said Gong Yi, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Yangtze Memory Technologies. "Yangtze Memory Technologies is honored to be a member of this ecosystem. With the new NAND flash memory, we will jointly bring more flexible solutions to emerging cloud storage needs and improve data center efficiency."

Availability

The new Marvell chipsets are sampling now to select customers. For more information on the new cloud and data center SSD controllers, see the Bravera SC5 SSD Controller Family product page. Additional resources are available on the Bravera SC5 Media Kit page.

About Marvell

Our strongest foundation is our partnership with our customers, upon which we build solutions to deliver data infrastructure technologies that connect the world. For 25 years, we have been trusted by the world's leading technology companies to design semiconductor solutions for our customers' current needs and future ambitions to move, store, process and protect the world's data. Through deep collaboration and transparent processes, we ultimately change the way the future enterprise, cloud, automotive and operator architectures are transformed for a better tomorrow.