A new era in connected intelligence?

Connected intelligence is gaining momentum and evolving at an astonishing rate.  An ever-expanding network of connected cars, 5G wireless base stations, smart cities, robotic factories and tens of billions of IoT devices will commensurately generate an enormous amount of data.  Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and machine learning is fostering the need for data and services to be processed and stored as close to the edge of the network rather than at mega-scale cloud data centers.  Utilizing composable infrastructure, a framework providing flexibility of compute, storage and networking resources managed by software, the traditional need to physically configure hardware can be eliminated.  Data centers require new technologies to support composable infrastructure as well as to enable reduced power consumption, low latency and smaller footprints.

The Marvell Prestera CX 8500 portfolio represents a revolutionary approach to data center architectures with features offering unprecedented workflow visibility, analytics and network simplification to support QoS, traffic management and scalability.  To manage the network complexity of composable infrastructure, Marvell’s new switch solutions utilize groundbreaking Storage Aware Flow Engine (SAFE) technology.  SAFE facilitates virtual storage orchestration by providing greater insight into network flows with per flow visibility, advanced telemetry and comprehensive diagnostics that identify and resolve network congestion. 

At the same time, integrating innovative Forwarding Architecture using Slices of Terabit Ethernet Routers (FASTER) technology, the Marvell Prestera CX 8500 family brings high radix cores and congestion-aware load balancing.  By enabling virtualization for scalability, FASTER results in a reduction in the number of network layers and simplifies complexity, allowing edge data center networks to be collapsed into a single layer, ultimately lowering power, space and latency.  Most importantly, FASTER can reduce overall network costs by more than 50%. 

“Leveraging two decades of field proven deployments of Prestera technology with more than three billion Ethernet switch ports shipped as well as demonstrated leadership in Ethernet networking and storage technology, Marvell is revolutionizing data center switching,” said Eric Hayes, senior vice president and general manager of the Networking Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.  “Specifically, our newest Prestera CX solutions incorporate cutting-edge SAFE and FASTER technologies at bandwidths up to 12.8 Tbps, unleashing 32 ports of 400 Gbps or 256 ports of 50 Gbps network throughput.  Marvell’s innovations are enabling edge data centers to implement a higher performance network in a smaller footprint, with substantially lower power and cost.”

“Marvell’s new switch introduction strengthens the company’s excellent infrastructure semiconductor solutions and delivers on the vision of the optimized modern data center,” said Bob Wheeler, vice president and principal analyst for networking, The Linley Group.  “This new solution from Marvell includes meaningful industry firsts that address the demand for composability of storage and compute functions in edge data centers.”