“Data center storage underutilization has reached epidemic and expensive levels,” said Eran Kirzner, Lightbits Labs CEO and Co-Founder. “By unlocking the full value of NVMe, we’ve changed the playing field for private clouds. Our customers – private cloud and SaaS providers – can now capitalize on the best of both worlds: the application performance of using local NVMe SSD with the simplicity and efficiency of hyperscale.”
In the data center, converged infrastructure deployments with direct-attached solid state drives (SSDs) have constrained ratios of storage to compute, leading to underutilized resources. The result is lost capital and operating expenditures, including power consumption, real estate and more. Reducing or eliminating stranded resources represents significant cost savings.
LightOS software and the LightField storage acceleration card provide a high-performance, end-to-end disaggregation solution that can scale without requiring any changes to clients or network infrastructure. The result is that cloud infrastructures can now achieve optimal scale at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). With LightOS and LightField, application owners can fully utilize truly composable storage that is indistinguishable from low-latency Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) SSDs. By transitioning from fast, but inefficient, DAS SSDs to disaggregated NVMe storage, users will enjoy a fast cloud infrastructure with dramatically higher storage utilization at scale.
By harnessing multiple NVMe SSDs in one large pool, the LightOS GFTL significantly boosts performance and delivers rich data services while enhancing the endurance of commodity SSDs. LightOS and LightField optimize application performance by supporting millions of IOPS at latencies that are similar to DAS SSDs.
Lightbits Labs enters the market with approximately $50 million in funding, with investments from marquee strategic investors including DellEMC, Cisco, and Micron.
Analyst: NVMe over TCP Opens New Opportunities for NVMe Storage
“NVMe over Fabric allows customers to share high performance NVMe-based storage across servers, but the implementations available to date have required custom hardware and/or software on the server-side that can make these configurations complex to scale and manage,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “A new option, based on the NVMe over Fabric standard and the TCP transport, uses the standard Ethernet adapters and drivers that ship with all industry-standard servers and requires no custom content in attached servers, making it not only much easier but much less expensive to share high performance NVMe storage. Vendors like Lightbits Labs that make these solutions available are opening up the opportunity for NVMe storage to be much more widely shared in enterprise environments, and IDC expects NVMe over Fabric deployments to begin to ramp based on the availability of TCP transport options.”
Product details: Light OS
Product details: LightField
Customer Quotes
Zachary Smith, Co-Founder and CEO at IaaS provider Packet:
- “With Lightbits technology, we can provide network attached NVMe devices with 'as good or better' performance characteristics as local NVMe.”
- “Doing this over our existing Ethernet-based network with standard 10/25G network cards is a game changer versus other solutions in the market.”
Fortune 500 SaaS cloud service provider:
- “On standard server-hardware, Lightbits out-performs the most expensive flash-array solutions we have in our infrastructure at a fraction of the cost while providing a delivery mechanism that provides universal access to our entire server-fleet with no compromises.”
- “Universal access to NVMe flash in our data centers is a key goal for 2019 and Lightbits is one of the leading solutions to getting us there."
Available Now
LightOS and LightField have been successfully tested in industry-leading cloud data centers. LightOS can be purchased separately as a software-only solution or purchased as a bundle with the LightField hardware accelerator.
About the NVMe/TCP Standard
Lightbits Labs, Facebook, Intel, Cisco, DellEMC, Micron and others collaborated on the NVMe/TCP standard, which was ratified by NVM Express® as an approved transport layer for non-volatile memory express (NVMe) in November, 2018. As the storage industry’s pioneer in NVMe/TCP, Lightbits helped drive the standardization effort and worked closely with NVM Express and its member companies, including taking a leadership role in the initial development of the standard specifications. Designed to layer over existing software-based TCP transport implementations as well as future hardware accelerated implementations, NVMe/TCP lets large-scale data centers utilize their existing, ubiquitous TCP/IP infrastructure to realize NVMe’s performance benefits.
Additional Resources:
- Video: Lightbits Demo at Flash Memory Summit 2018
- Article: Welcome NVMe™/TCP to the NVMe-oF™ Family of Transports
- Webinar: NVMe™/TCP: What You Need to Know About the Specification
- Webinar: What NVMe™/TCP Means for Networked Storage
- LightOS Product Brief
- LightField Product Brief
About Lightbits Labs™
Lightbits Labs, founded in 2016, is remaking modern cloud infrastructure on a global scale. The company’s mission is to reinvent the way storage and networking are conducted in cloud data centers. As trailblazers in this field, its solutions are successfully being used in industry-leading cloud data centers around the globe. With strategic investors including DellEMC, Cisco, and Micron, and with investments from Chairman and Founder Avigdor Willenz, Lightbits Labs is disaggregating storage and compute to improve performance and TCO.
Learn more at www.lightbitslabs.com or contact us at info@lightbitslabs.com.
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