We’re Building the Future of Data Infrastructure

March 17, 2017

Three Days, Two Speaking Sessions and One New Product Line: Marvell Sets the (IEEE 802.1BR) Standard for Data Center Solutions at the 2017 OCP U.S. Summit

By Michael Zimmerman, Vice President and General Manager, CSIBU, Marvell

At last week’s 2017 OCP U.S. Summit, it was impossible to miss the buzz and activity happening at Marvell’s booth. Taking our mantra #MarvellOnTheMove to heart, the team worked tirelessly throughout the week to present and demo Marvell’s vision for the future of the data center, which came to fruition with the launch of our newest Prestera® PX Passive Intelligent Port Extender (PIPE) family. 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

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Marvell kicked off OCP with two speaking sessions from its leading technologists. Yaniv Kopelman, Networking CTO of the Networking Group, presented "Extending the Lifecycle of 3.2T Switches,” a discussion on the concept of port extender technology and how to apply it to future data center architecture. Michael Zimmerman, vice president and general manager of the Networking Group, then spoke on "Modular Networking" and teased Marvell's first modular solution based on port extender technology. 

Throughout the show, customers, media and attendees visited Marvell’s booth to see our breakthrough innovations that are leading the disaggregation of the cloud network infrastructure industry. These products included: 

Marvell's Prestera PX PIPE family purpose-built to reduce power consumption, complexity and cost in the data center 

Marvell’s 88SS1092 NVMe SSD controller designed to help boost next-generation storage and data center systems 

Marvell’s Prestera 98CX84xx switch family designed to help data centers break the 1W per 25G port barrier for 25G Top-of-Rack (ToR) applications 

Marvell’s ARMADA® 64-bit ARM®-based modular SoCs developed to improve the flexibility, performance and efficiency of servers and network appliances in the data center 

Marvell’s Alaska® C 100G/50G/25G Ethernet transceivers which enable low-power, high-performance and small form factor solutions 

We’re especially excited to introduce our PIPE solution on the heels of OCP because of the dramatic impact we anticipate it will have on the data center… 

Until now, data centers with 10GbE and 25GbE port speeds have been challenged with achieving lower operating expense (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) costs as their bandwidth needs increase. As the industry’s first purpose-built port extender supporting the IEEE 802.1BR standard, Marvell’s PIPE solution is a revolutionary approach that makes it possible to deploy ToR switches at half the power and cost of a traditional Ethernet switch. 

Marvell’s PIPE solution enables data centers to be architected with a very simple, low-cost, low-power port extender in place of a traditional ToR switch, pushing the heavy switching functionality upstream. As the industry today transitions from 10GbE to 25GbE and from 40GbE to 100GbE port speeds, data centers are also in need of a modular building block to bridge the variety of current and next-generation port speeds. Marvell’s PIPE family provides a flexible and scalable solution to simplify and accelerate such transitions, offering multiple configuration options of Ethernet connectivity for a range of port speeds and port densities.

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Amidst all of the announcements, speaking sessions and demos, our very own George Hervey, principal architect, also sat down with Semiconductor Engineering’s Ed Sperling for a Tech Talk. In the white board session, George discussed the power efficiency of networking in the enterprise and how costs can be saved by rightsizing Ethernet equipment. 

The 2017 OCP U.S. Summit was filled with activity for Marvell, and we can’t wait to see how our customers benefit from our suite of data center solutions. In the meantime, we’re here to help with all of your data center needs, questions and concerns as we watch the industry evolve. 

What were some of your OCP highlights? Did you get a chance to stop by the Marvell booth at the show? Tweet us at @marvellsemi to let us know, and check out all of the activity from last week. We want to hear from you!

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