Marvell unveils world’s fastest NAS technology

We're used to seeing Marvell and Sandforce going head to head in the SSD space. Each new generation brings innovation – which directly leads to improved performance. But, to be honest, SSDs are bloody quick already. We're more likely to notice an improvement on a part of our everyday-use network, that is a genuine bottleneck. Cue Marvell and its work with Tuxera.

Even for Gurus of the Kit, it's hard to know which of the thousands of unknown technology companies will become world famous off teh back of a small innovation. With Marvell and Sandforce, they have become (geek)household names off the back of the SSD performance war that has no raged for two years.

But when you look around your office/home network, surely the NAS box is the slowest device. We know that our video guys spend ages waiting for mega-large files to move around the backup systems. If only they were quicker. Well, according to Marvell, now they are.

At least according to the latest joint statement from these companies.

Marvell  and Tuxera have announced the industry’s fastest full-featured NAS solution. Built on the Marvell Kirkwood and Armada chipsets, Tuxera’s optimized XFS and NTFS technology offers superior performance compared to competing Linux solutions.

Marvell and Tuxera’s joint solution is designed to reduce overall development cost and enable faster time to market for customers’ NAS platforms. The achieved gains in speed enable a new generation of NAS applications that offer a seamless user experience-as well as full portability across NTFS and other storage formats. The solution marks a significant breakthrough as consumers and businesses seek more efficient means to store and serve volumes of data and multimedia files across networked devices.

When asked about the benefits, each company was on standby with typically awkward sounding corporate statements.

“Our collaboration with Tuxera, who delivers industry-leading file system solutions for NAS, reinforces Marvell’s leadership and commitment to breaking barriers in the storage space,” said Paul Valentine, vice president of marketing for the Enterprise Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. “We understand performance is paramount for NAS customers, and we believe features such as file system optimizations-combined with both companies’ reputations for quality and support-place Marvell and Tuxera well ahead of the competition.”

“Tuxera is pleased to integrate XFS and NTFS technology with Marvell’s market-leading application processors,” said Mikko V?m?, CEO of Tuxera. “Over the past year, Tuxera’s experts in XFS, ARM, network, Samba and performance tuning have worked diligently with Marvell engineers to reach a new industry record in speed. Together, we give manufacturers top-flight, fully-supported NAS solutions they can trust.”

At 129 megabytes per second, Marvell and Tuxera’s NAS solution offers the fastest 2 GHz NAS performance on the market. In addition, Tuxera has optimized and tuned XFS for Marvell customers’ most common workloads. Tuxera’s NTFS technology is the industry’s only solution of this speed to come pre-integrated with Marvell’s Kirkwood and ARMADA chipsets.

XFS is a mature and scalable file system designed for use with multiple CPUs and disk arrays (RAID). NTFS is currently the most popular, scalable interoperable storage format for external backup.

KitGuru says: We can't wait to see how much impact these improvements will have on the lives of people like video editors who want to munch and crunch and bunch gigabytes of data to and from their NAS devices. We have a vested interest.

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