The cards support several virtual hypervisors including KVM, Xen, VMWare and operating systems such as Red Hat and Windows.

"This is about how to manage data as it flows through to a SATA or a SAS SSD," Kung said. "You can take standard, off-the-shelf consumer SSDs (MLC) with a cost of less than one dollar per gig and connect them to a Marvell card and create a solution that's better in performance, has lower latency but is a fraction of the cost of high-end PCIe SSDs."

The starting price for an NVCache card with 4GB of DRAM is about $3,500. Pricing wasn't available for the NVRAM accelerator card.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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