Lightbits Labs debuts initial NVMe/TCP clustered storage offering that helps protect against data loss and service interruption at scale

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.

Amazon VPC Ingress Routing and Trend Micro help simplify network security

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced availability of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Ingress Routing service. As a Launch Partner for Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, Trend Micro continues to innovate alongside AWS to provide solutions to customers—enabling new approaches to network security. 

Trend Micro TippingPoint and Trend Micro Cloud One integrate with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing deliver network security that allows customers to obtain compliance by inspecting both ingress and egress traffic, thereby providing user with a deployment experience designed to eliminate any disruption in the business.

Amazon VPC Ingress Routing is a service that helps customers simplify the integration of network and security appliances within their network topology. With Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, customers can define routing rules at the Internet Gateway (IGW) and Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) to redirect ingress traffic to third-party appliances, before it reaches the final destination. This makes it easier for customers to deploy production-grade applications with the networking and security services they require within their Amazon VPC.

By enabling customers to redirect their north-south traffic flowing in and out of a VPC through internet gateway and virtual private gateway to the Trend Micro cloud network security solution. Not only does this enable customers to screen all external traffic before it reaches the subnet, but it also allows for the interception of traffic flowing into different subnets, using different instances of the Trend Micro solution.

Trend Micro customers now have the ability to have cloud network layer security in AWS leveraging Amazon VPC Ingress Routing. With this enhancement, customers can deploy in any VPC, without any disruptive re-architecture and without introducing any additional routing or proxies. Deploying directly inline is the ideal solution and enables simplified network security without disruption in the cloud.

A defense-in-depth or layered security approach is important to organizations, especially at the cloud network layer. That being said, customers need to be able to deploy a solution without re-architecting or slowing down their business, the problem is, previous solutions in the marketplace couldn’t meet both requirements.

So, when customers wanted TippingPoint intrusion prevention system (IPS) capabilities to be brought to the cloud, Trend Micro responded with a solution. Backed by research from Trend Micro Research, including the Zero Day Initiative, Trend Micro created a solution that includes cloud network IPS capabilities, incorporating detection, protection and threat disruption—without any disruption to the network.

At AWS re:Invent 2018, AWS announced the launch of Amazon Transit Gateway. This architecture enables customers to route traffic through a hub and spoke topology, and leverage this as a primary deployment model in the Cloud Network Protection, powered by TippingPoint, cloud IPS solution, announced in July this year. This enabled customers to gain broad security and compliance, without re-architecting, and the company will soon add a flexible deployment model.

YJFX chooses Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out customer service infrastructure

Red Hat announced that YJFX Inc., a financial subsidiary of Yahoo Group focused on foreign exchange services, has adopted Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out the company’s private cloud infrastructure. 

Red Hat’s massively scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers YJFX extensive scalability, helping it deliver new infrastructure more quickly as it seeks to bring differentiating applications and services to end users.

YJFX provides online foreign exchange (forex) trading services in 22 currencies as well as investment trust services. As a leading service provider in the forex industry, YJFX constantly seeks new ways to improve customer satisfaction along with the reliability and quality of its offered services, both current and new. To continue enhancing the customer experience, YJFX wanted to drive innovation at all levels of the company’s IT stack, starting with the infrastructure layer.

The company’s existing IT environment for building new services used proprietary virtualization technologies running on public cloud infrastructure. While workable, this strategy made delivering new infrastructure environments in a timely manner difficult. 

The IT teams in charge of the infrastructure had to manually make adjustments to deliver individual environments and servers, increasing time to market of new services while increasing procurement costs. From a cost and time perspective, these challenges limited YJFX’s ability to drive innovation more quickly.

In order to drive down the costs and time associated with delivering new services, YJFX wanted to empower its developers to self-provision their environments more quickly without having to rely on IT operations teams. To do this, the company began exploring options beyond the public cloud in 2018, electing to migrate to a scalable, private cloud built on Red Hat OpenStack.

Built on the open industry standards of the OpenStack project, Red Hat OpenStack Platform delivers the innovation of the OpenStack community to YJFX paired with hardened codes, enterprise security updates and the expertise and support of Red Hat. 

YJFX also participated in a discovery session of the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution, provided by Red Hat. With the support of Red Hat Consulting, YJFX was able to better visualize the issues and effects of the migration project as well as conceptualize an image of the ideal private cloud development environment. 

To deploy the new Red Hat-based private cloud, YJFX enlisted DTS CORPORATION, a systems integrator, to handle the migration work and build out the new infrastructure. After comparing the costs of maintaining and operating its existing infrastructure to the new private cloud platform, YJFX expects to see the associated expenses lowered by 30-40 percent over the next five years. 

The time needed to prepare development environments, which previously could take as long as one month, has now been reduced to a few hours thanks to developers being able to self-provision resources. This has also led to a reduction in workload for IT operations staff while providing a flexible, scalable infrastructure layer that can help drive new application delivery and improve customer service.

The initial migration for the dealing room was completed at the end of April this year.

Cloudera Data Platform now available on Microsoft Azure; helps decide on analytic function both in the cloud or on-premises

Cloudera announced on Wednesday that the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) powered by Microsoft Azure. CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to secure, manage, and deploy. 

Now available on Azure, it delivers self-service analytics with a consistent Azure experience and enterprise-grade performance across hybrid environments with the granular security and governance policies that IT leaders demand. 

CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to deploy, manage, and use.  By simplifying operations, CDP reduces the time to onboard new use cases across the organization. It uses machine learning to intelligently autoscale workloads up and down for more cost-effective use of cloud infrastructure.

CDP manages data in any environment, including multiple public clouds, bare metal, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. With Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX), the security and governance capabilities in CDP, IT can confidently deliver secure analytics running against data anywhere. CDP is a new approach to enterprise data, anywhere from the edge to AI.

CDP on Azure includes Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX), which makes it easy to create a secure data lake in hours instead of weeks and replaces tedious scripting with 'set it and forget it' convenience. With CDP on Azure, organizations can speed time to value for data engineering, data warehousing, and machine learning. 

Cloudera leverages Azure infrastructure services such as Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) to run high performance analytics with increased availability and durability; Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy infrastructure as code in Azure, ensuring rapid, consistent, and repeatable deployment of CDP services; and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to scale up or down depending on the analytics workload to meet service level agreements (SLA) and take advantage of the benefits of cloud bursting.

"For enterprise IT, this means that delivering speed and agility is now just as important as security and governance when it comes to enterprise data management and advanced analytics,” said Mick Hollison, chief marketing officer of Cloudera. “CDP, powered by Microsoft Azure, provides IT with an integrated data platform to work at the speed of business with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance for any type of data."

"Cloudera customers choose Azure because of the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a global, hybrid cloud offering using their favorite tools and frameworks," said Arpan Shah, General Manager, Azure Marketing, Microsoft. "I am excited to have the Cloudera Data Platform available on Azure."

Cloudera Data Platform is available for preview on Azure.