Increases performance and endurance with intelligent flash management.
The 44th IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Kam Eshgi, Chief Strategy Officer, Abel Gordon, Chief System Architect at Lightbits Labs, and Gary McCulley, Director, Data Platform Group, Data Storage Technology at Intel.
Lightbits' vision is to make high-performance disaggregated storage simple, agile, and cost-efficient for any cloud. They provide enterprise features at NVMe speeds, on any server with the following features:
Flexible: scale storage independently
Lower TCO: increased flash endurance, data reduction, no hypervisor 0n storage nodes
High performance: high IOPS, consistent low latency
Multi-tenant: single storage cluster can service multiple environments
Easy: existing TCP/IP network, run on commodity servers
High-availability: SSD-level eRAID, volume replication
Lightbits cloud data platform with intelligence flash management provides simplicity, agility, and efficiency. Simplicity is achieved with software-defined API-driven architecture, enterprise data services and availability, and standard infrastructure. Agility is enabled by dynamic scale up or out, deploy on any cloud - private, edge, and public, as well as on VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack. The inherent efficiency increases ROI with high performance reduces TCO with disaggregation and extends flash endurance.
This results in 80% lower TCO than DAS, SDS, and SAN. Up to 75 million IOPS. Latency is as low as 160us. Up to 20X more endurance compared to DAS, SDS, and SAN.
Lightbits is addressing the challenges of direct-attached storage (DAS) like:
Stranded capacity and IOPS and low flash utilization
Applications locked to servers and storage
Expensive data recovery with extended service degradation and severe network impact
With the following benefits:
High storage utilization with regards to both capacity and performance
Compute and storage scale independently
Fully multi-tenant storage shared across multiple environments
Consistent high performance and low latency with better endurance
Intelligent flash management that is TLC and QLC optimized
Low TCO
The solution provides local flash performance with rich data services including logical volumes with online resize, thin provisioning, inline compression, redirect-on-write snapshots and clones, online SSD capacity expansion, high performance, and consistent low latency, quality of service, and encryption are forthcoming.
Use Cases
Private clouds are challenged to reduce IT infrastructure costs while delivering reliable service to multiple business units, with aging IT infrastructure and a shortage of resources, and a need to simplify the provisioning of resources. Lightbits reduce TCO by 80% while increasing endurance by 20X. It provides secure and reliable multi-tenant data storage with QoS. Companies can continue to use existing infrastructure. All of this is accessible via API-driven, automated software-defined storage.
"With Lightbits, we get similar performance to DAS, a more resilient environment and we reduce our server footprint by 33%." -- Storage Design Director at a large U.S. IT Company
Financial Services are challenged by rapidly changing consumer banking services, globalization of competition and services, reduced IT budgets, and aging IT infrastructure. Lightbits API-driven automation enables agility, provides consistently high performance with scalable architecture, and up to 80% lower TCO with a 20X endurance improvement.
"We have chosen NMMe/TCP for our cloud. Lightbits is the only vendor who was able to get a storage solution to work in our environment, integrating with OpenStack and Kubernetes." -- Top Global Investment Management Firm
Cloud service providers are challenged to find new revenue streams to increase market share, hold margins in light of competition, accelerate time to market and shortage of resources. Lightbits provides consistent high performance and low latency while reducing TCO by up to 80% and increasing endurance by 20% with API-driven automated software-defined storage using existing infrastructure with no need to provision new.
"Lightbits reduced our setup time from days to minutes." Finanz Informatik Technologie Service
Lightbits - Intel Collaboration
Intel is an investor in Lighbits and they are collaborating to provide high performance and acceleration on Intel Xeon scalable processors. Lightbits with Intel Xeon scalable processors provides:
Efficient utilization of more core and higher frequency
Higher platform performance
Optimal UPI access for increased CPU I/O throughput
Enhanced memory performance, capacity, and bandwidth
More, faster I/O across PCIe lanes
Intel Volume Management Device (VMD)
Application Device Queues (ADQ)