Lightbits Labs (Lightbits), the inventor of the NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP) protocol is a high-performance block storage enterprise cloud data platform for on-premises, private, hybrid and public clouds. Partnerships with industry leaders like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), result in jointly engineered e-data platform solutions that expand capabilities for organizations pursuing more efficient, agile, scalable, and modern software-defined infrastructure, such as eCommerce, financial services, cloud service providers, AI cloud providers, and many more.
HPE Partnership and Industry Collaboration
Lightbits and HPE have teamed up to drive accelerated software-defined storage solutions in the large enterprise financial services sector. High-frequency trading organizations, national and global banks, and credit card companies are among the types of customers that need high-performance storage for I/O-intensive workloads, such as AI, real-time analytics, and transactional workloads.
Lightbits, an HPE Silver Level Technology Partner, is validated with the HPE Proliant DL385 and the HPE Alletra 4110 Storage Servers.
Pictured above is an HPE Alletra Storage Server 4110 20EDSFF – Photo credit: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/PSN1014699109UKEN
Testing and Validation
Lightbits recently completed acceptance testing of the new Alletra 4110 storage server from HPE. The goal was to validate the server’s performance and functionality when used as clustered storage with Lightbits high-performance software-defined storage.
The Alletra 4110 was put through a comprehensive test suite covering key storage functionality, hardware compatibility, and performance benchmarks using industry-standard tools like FIO. Tests were conducted in a minimum viable configuration including:
- Alletra 4110 server with dual Intel Xeon Gold 6426Y CPUs, 512GB RAM, and 20x 3.84TB NVMe SSDs
- Separate client server generating storage workloads over 100GbE networking
- Basic Lightbits configuration with compression enabled
Key Findings from the Testing
- The Alletra 4110 integrated seamlessly with Lightbits, demonstrating full functionality for provisioning volumes, connecting clients, reading/writing data, and handling hardware events.
- Performance was strong across read, write, and mixed workloads at both 4KB and 128KB IO sizes. Highlights include:
- 1.75M Read IOPS and 1.54M Write IOPS at 4KB (QD64)
- Up to 104K IOPS on mixed read/write at 128KB
- Excellent 99th percentile latencies of <300μs (QD1)
- Canonical 4KB latency (performed with 1 QD and 1 job) testing showed exceptional responsiveness, with average read latencies of just 104μs and average write latency of 44μs.
- The server handled high-endurance preconditioning workloads without issues.
While results were positive, even better performance could likely be achieved with higher core count CPUs and a multi-node configuration taking advantage of Lightbits’ replication.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Pictured is the DL385 Gen 10 Server
Photo credit: https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/compute/rack-servers/proliant-dl300-servers/proliant-dl385-server/hpe-proliant-dl385-gen10-plus-v2-server/p/1013291283
Overall, the Alletra 4110 is an excellent option for high-performance, scalable clustered storage with Lightbits software-defined storage platform. The combination enables flexibility and efficiency for private cloud environments.
Lightbits Labs continues to lead the way in high-performance elastic block storage through software-defined storage solutions leveraging the NVMe/TCP protocol we pioneered.
Are you ready to leverage the power of Lightbits storage for your enterprise? Our Sales team is here to help you configure the perfect solution tailored to your needs. Contact us today to discover how Lightbits can transform your storage infrastructure.
- Partnership Inquiries: partners@lightbitslabs.com
- Sales Inquiries: info@lightbitslabs.com
Additional resources:
- Solution Brief: HPE ProLiant servers and Lightbits Cloud Data Platform (HPE Proliant DL385)
- Data Sheet: HPE DL386 Gen 10
- Solution Brief: HPE and Lightbits – HPE Alletra 4110 Storage Server (coming soon)
- Lightbits Overview
- Lightbits Cloud Data Platform – High-Performance Block Storage
- Lightbits for Financial Services
About HPE
HPE is the global edge-to-cloud company built to transform your business. By helping you connect, protect, analyze, and act on all your data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so you can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world.
