In 2018 Marvell introduced the 88NR2241 Intelligent NVMe Switch: the primary—and up to now, solely—NVMe {hardware} RAID controller of its sort. Now that chip has scored its first main (public) design win with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The HPE NS204i-p is a brand new RAID adapter card for M.2 NVMe SSDs, supposed to supply RAID-1 safety to a pair of 480GB boot drives in HPE ProLiant and Apollo techniques.
The HPE NS204i-p is a half-height, half-length PCIe 3.zero x4 adapter card designed by Marvell for HPE. It options the 88NR2241 NVMe swap and two M.2 PCIe x4 slots that join via the Marvell swap. This just isn’t a typical PCIe swap as typically seen offering fan-out of extra PCIe lanes, however one which operates at a better stage and natively understands the NVMe protocol.
The NS204i-p adapter is configured particularly to supply RAID-1 (mirroring) of two SSDs, presenting them to the host system as a single NVMe gadget. This is the important thing benefit of the 88NR2241 over different NVMe RAID options: the host system would not must know something concerning the RAID array and continues to make use of the same old NVMe drivers. Competing NVMe RAID options available in the market are both SAS/SATA/NVMe “tri-mode” RAID controllers that require NVMe drives to be accessed utilizing proprietary SCSI interfaces, or are software program RAID techniques with the accompanying CPU overhead.
Based on the supplied photographs, it appears like HPE is equipping the NS204i-p with a pair of SK hynix NVMe SSDs. The spec sheet signifies these are from a read-oriented product tier, so the endurance score ought to be 1 DWPD (someplace round 876 TBW for 480GB drives).
This resolution is claimed to supply a number of instances the efficiency of SATA boot drive(s), and might obtain excessive availability of the OS and log storage with out utilizing up entrance hot-swap bays on a server. The HPE NS204i-p is now obtainable for buy from HPE, however pricing has not been publicly disclosed.
