Lightbits Labs, provider of NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) software-defined disaggregated storage, advanced on Wednesday its software solution, LightOS, to deliver the first NVMe/TCP clustered storage solution.
With more companies moving away from direct attached storage (DAS), and with storage requirements typically growing far faster than compute requirements, both public-cloud providers and private-cloud builders are looking for ways to separate storage and compute so each can scale separately.
One of the limiting factors to scaling disaggregated storage, however, is the need for high availability across clusters of storage and compute. Lightbits LightOS delivers the availability, flexibility and efficiency of hyperscale cloud infrastructure to on-premise data centers.
LightOS provides software-defined disaggregated storage for cloud data centers delivering similar performance as direct-attached NVMe SSDs and up to a 50 percent reduction in tail latency; independent scaling of storage and compute, driving better infrastructure utilization and efficiency and providing unparalleled flexibility; and standards-based NVMe/TCP block storage access protocol for application servers to storage servers communication
LightOS clusters leverage standard NVMe 1.4 multipathing and offers data replications on storage target side, which provides transparency to the client with quick failover. It also includes distributed and durable cluster management with fast failover handling; no single point of failure in data and control paths, and allows multiple LightOS clusters can exist in the same cloud data center and can be aggregated and managed as one large cloud-scale block storage solution.
LightOS is now the first NVMe/TCP storage solution that protects against data loss and avoids service interruptions at scale. In the presence of server, storage, or network failures, LightOS maximizes operational efficiency, ensuring applications continue working in the presence of failures, and failover is handled automatically, keeping data fully consistent and available.
The average cost of IT downtime is enormous. According to Gartner, the average loss is $5,600 per minute. This can add up to more than half a million dollars lost per hour at the higher end.
“At cloud scale, everything fails, so we built LightOS to capture all the benefits of disaggregated storage while providing exceptional durability and availability to prevent service disruption,” said Kam Eshghi, chief strategy officer at Lightbits Labs.
For cloud-native applications, access to available, performant and deployable infrastructure is key to business agility and application experience, at any scale - regardless of whether deployed as five nodes, five hundred nodes, or thousands of nodes.
Installed on commodity servers in large-scale data centers, LightOS is optimized for I/O intensive compute clusters, such as Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB, and time series databases. With end-to-end NVMe, LightOS delivers high performance and consistently low latency. The result is a 10 times increase in storage reliability and 50 percent decrease in total cost of ownership (TCO).
As a standard-based, target-only solution that does not require installing any proprietary software on the client side, the ease of deployment at scale is unmatched. LightOS is built to run in existing data center, requiring no changes to application servers or network infrastructure, so that deploying it at scale is a breeze.
As LightOS provides highly available, flexible, and efficient disaggregated storage, application teams can focus their efforts on developing new services to achieve their business goals, while lowering spend and delivering high performance.
