Multi-vendor environments have been the norm for decades to accelerate innovation, lower costs, and enable customers to optimize infrastructure with best-of-breed technologies.

But are there still hidden advantages going with a vertically integrated vendor?

Marvell, Dell and Cisco set out to answer this question in storage networking by submitting two SAN solutions to Tolly, a technical benchmarking service: the Dell PowerStore 32G Enterprise Storage Solution¹ and the Dell PowerMax 64G Enterprise Storage Solution.² The solutions combine Marvell® QLogic® 32G and 64G Fibre Channel HBAs with Dell PowerEdge 17G servers, Connectrix MDS Switches and Directors, as well as PowerStore and PowerMax storage.

Tolly found the systems delivered on seamless interoperability. More importantly, the technologies from the individual vendors such as highlighting the SAN congestion mitigation and comprehensive security.  

Better together, in other words, is better. The set-up and the test results are below.  

FPINs and Virtual Lanes Offer Interoperability and Compatibility

The solutions offer comprehensive 32/64G Fibre Channel (FC) interoperability, making the solution easy to adopt for storage networking applications in the data center.

The features are also plug-and-play compatible for seamless experience. The Marvell Fabric Performance Impact Notification frames (FPINs) and Virtual Lanes (VLs) for SAN endpoint connections, for example, pair well with Connectrix MDS’ Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL) inside the FC storage area network (SAN). Marvell HBAs uniquely offer these VLs, which are compatible with all FC switches, including solution partner Cisco. 

Resilience

The two FC HBA solutions from Marvell deliver automated resilience, featuring rapid failover and recovery capabilities.

Robust and reliable, they ensure high availability and performance for essential workloads. The solution encapsulates HBA port and adapter resilience, as well as support for redundant FC fabrics.

Autonomous Congestion Mitigation 

When IT departments upgrade to lightning-fast storage, the slower servers in modern data centers may attempt to transfer more data than they can handle. That’s why one of the key features of the solutions is congestion mitigation, even in a finely tuned FC SAN.

Imagine data transmission as cars on the highway; there are fast lanes and slow lanes so cars can optimize their speed depending on their urgency. Marvell Virtual Lane Technology works in a similar way: when there is congestion, the FC HBA autonomously switches the session associated with the slow drain congestion to a slow virtual lane. Essentially, the solution creates a multi-lane highway out of a single-lane country road, so the slow traffic goes in the slow lane, which avoids impeding “normal” or “fast” traffic that is a higher-priority. This self-healing system with bandwidth throttling and VL switching efficiently optimizes storage networking traffic.

Image from Tolly reports demonstrating Marvell QLogic Virtual Lane technology using the highway analogy.

Security

With high volumes of data flowing in these enterprise systems, security is another priority. The storage solution by Marvell, Dell and Cisco ensures security in all FC SAN elements within the data center, including HBAs.

Marvell QLogic HBAs support CNSA-strength (Commercial National Security Algorithm) silicon "root of trust" for secure host boot as well as comprehensive Encrypted Data in Flight (EDIF), protecting FC SAN connections between servers and storage. The hyper-speed encryption (Marvell StorCryption) also operates at wire speed and effortlessly integrates with Cisco fabric security features.

Total Results

Marvell, Dell and Cisco are providing a better together valuable storage networking solution, as verified by Tolly, that enables “better together” hardware for end users while supplying defense-in-depth security. This lowers the barrier to entry, thereby increasing the adoption rate of these Fibre Channel solutions. 

Solution Video Overview

In a webinar hosted by Tolly Enterprises, Marvell had a chance to explain how its components in the multi-vendor solution function.