Lightbits Labs Delivers Industry’s First Software-Defined NVMe/TCP Storage Solution for VMware

Lightbits Labs, a leader in NVMe-based, scalable and software-defined elastic block storage that is fully optimized on Intel hardware for private and edge clouds, announced that it has successfully completed a rigorous certification of LightOS with VMware vSphere 7 Update 3 and will be listed on the VMware Compatibility Guide. LightOS software-defined storage, fueled by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built in AI accelerators, Intel Optane Persistent memory (PMem) and 100Gb Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters, offers the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability for VMware vSphere while lowering cost. 

Lightbits pioneered NVMe/TCP, developing a disaggregated storage solution that is easy to deploy at scale, while delivering performance that is similar to local flash. As a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and design partner, Lightbits has been collaborating with VMware on development and testing of the new vSphere NVMe/TCP feature. Supporting native NVMe/TCP in VMware vSphere is a major step toward delivering an end-to-end NVMe solutions ecosystem.  

LightOS supercharges VMware environments with these benefits:

• Simple: It’s easy to consume over TCP/IP networks using standard protocols and drivers. Seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructure and VMware environments.
• Flexible: software only, disaggregated architecture allows for independent scaling of storage and compute. Runs on commodity hardware of customer’s choosing for a broad range of use cases. 
• High performance: Featuring Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel DL Boost, Intel Optane PMem, and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters with ADQ technology, LightOS delivers high IOPS and low latency with performance that is equivalent to local flash without proprietary hardware and rigid capacity and performance constraints.
• Lower TCO: Coupling Intel’s high-performance hardware platform with LightOS optimized for low-cost QLC SSDs, data reduction features dramatically improve efficiency, and disaggregated architecture maximizes resource utilization. Also, no hypervisor is required on storage nodes.
• Highly Available: Rich data services such as SSD-level Elastic RAID, per-volume replication, multi-tenancy, snapshots, clones, remote monitoring, and more that result in highly resilient, high availability storage that extends across the entire virtualized platform.

“Digital leaders turn to Equinix for high performance, foundational infrastructure that can be deployed globally and on-demand,” said Zac Smith, Managing Director, Equinix Metal. “For years, NVMe/TCP has offered the promise of improved performance, increased deployment flexibility, and better cost efficiency through ‘hyperscale-style’ disaggregation of storage and compute, so we’re excited to see Lightbits, VMware, and Intel collaborating to bring this capability to our customers.”

LightOS is a scalable, efficient NVMe/TCP storage solution with intelligent flash management that improves flash endurance by up to 20X. It’s easy to deploy at scale and delivers performance that is equivalent to local flash. A single LightOS cluster can deliver over 40M IOPS (random Read) and 10PB user capacity, with less than 200μs latency. Organizations previously utilizing iSCSI can instead use NVMe/TCP on the same network infrastructure and realize much higher performance. In addition to high performance, LightOS offers rich data services such as multi-tenancy, thin-provisioning, snapshots, clones, remote monitoring, dynamic rebalancing, and more that result in highly resilient storage that extends across the entire virtualized platform. 

“With the explosion of data underway, companies are committing to digital transformation on a massive scale. To extract the value of this data, applications need to rapidly store, access, and analyze data. Over the past few years private clouds and cloud service providers have been running cloud native applications on Lightbits, benefiting from our Kubernetes integration. Now we are super-excited to have a high performance, highly available storage solution also for VMware users, with in-box support for NVMe/TCP,” said Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightbits. “Organizations with private clouds and hybrid clouds, as well as cloud service providers and financial service providers can now realize the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency benefits of a combined solution from VMware, Lightbits, and Intel.”

Lightbits, VMware, and Intel will jointly present a virtual breakout session, “Cloud Everywhere Transformation: NVMe/TCP Operating Models on Data Center and Cloud,” at VMworld 2021. To register or learn more about the session, click here. 

“Enterprise IT organizations supporting ESXi workloads, want access to the latest technologies to stay ahead in a highly competitive marketplace. Working with Lightbits and Intel, VMware is advancing its storage support with a strong roadmap for the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology that gives data centers unprecedented remote access to NVMe storage. The addition of support for NVMe/TCP ensures that VMware hosts can better support modern applications that need high IOPS, low latency block storage solutions that offer large capacity and high density per storage server.” – Paul Turner, Vice President Product Management vSphere, VMware