Drive chip maker Marvell announced in the SNW conference today it will release the DragonFly Virtual Storage Accelerator (VSA) later this year. The product is an accelerator card which aimed to deliver a tenfold increase in storage network throughput by caching and sorting a data in the server prior to sending it to back-end arrays, thus lowering I/O per second by 10 times. This comes especially handy when many VMs are running on a single server

“The DragonFly is powered by what Marvell calls its “HyperScale” embedded processor technology, an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) that controls nonvolatile RAM as L1 cache and SSD chips as L2 cache to maintain highly consistent writes by placing them in sequential order…”

According to Marvell, no changes to applications are required to deploy VSA, and Arun Taneja founder and lead analyst with market research firm Taneja Group even referred to the newly announced offering as a “paradigm shifting product.” This is partially due to what DragonFly VSA has to offer, but this claim can also be attributed to DragonFly’s uniqueness in the market: unlike other offerings operating on the storage level, it has to be installed on each individual server. This, according to Taneja, makes the accelerator card attractive for users operating private and public cloud infrastructures.

DragonFly is undergoing tests with select Marvell customers, and the chipmaker expects it will hit beta this summor for a period of roughly 3 months. Pricing is yet to be set, but Shawn Kung, Marvell’s director of product marketing noted the card will sell for less than $2,000.

Cloud infrastructure and particularly FCoE is one of the hottest topics boiling in SNW Spring 2011 right now, and Cisco also had its share of the buzz.