In the rapidly evolving world of eCommerce, where digital transformation is key, the architecture of data center infrastructure can make or break success. This was the challenge faced by one of Asia’s largest eCommerce platforms—a multi-billion-dollar company serving millions of users and handling millions of daily transactions. As the company grew, so did the complexity of its infrastructure needs, prompting a search for an eCommerce storage solution that could offer the flexibility, agility, and efficiency required to stay competitive in a global market. To achieve this they needed a scalable high-performance Kubernetes private cloud deployment for all their applications including database, analytics, AI, and messaging.
The Challenge: Modernizing for Flexibility and Efficiency
As the eCommerce giant scaled its operations, it became clear that their existing infrastructure was holding them back. They were using a mix of JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) and JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) designs, which led to inefficiencies and high operational costs. With thousands of drives deployed across multiple data centers, the company struggled with storage utilization driving up cost and the inability to scale storage independently from compute resources resulting in operational inefficiencies.
Moreover, their environment—comprised of high-performance databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, and Kafka, running in a dense Kubernetes (K8s) cloud—demanded a solution capable of delivering consistent low latency at scale. The need for modernization was clear: they required an enterprise software-defined storage solution that could keep pace with their rapid growth and provide the flexibility to adapt to future demands. Additionally, they were looking to enhance their private cloud infrastructure, ensuring it could support their large-scale eCommerce operations efficiently.
The Solution: Lightbits Enterprise Software Defined Storage
After evaluating their options, the eCommerce platform found its answer in the Lightbits software-defined storage solution. Lightbits, the inventor of NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP), offered a disaggregated storage solution that perfectly matched their needs.
The Lightbits platform provided several key advantages:
- Flexibility: The platform is software-defined, meaning it runs on commodity servers and uses ubiquitous TCP/IP networking. This flexibility allowed the eCommerce giant to choose the most cost-efficient hardware without compromising performance.
- Scalability: With Lightbits, the company could scale storage independently from compute, allowing them to grow their infrastructure in any direction as needed, crucial for addressing the performance and storage capacity requirements of their Kubernetes deployments.
- Efficiency: By moving away from direct-attached storage (DAS) to a high-performance software-defined storage solution, they dramatically improved storage utilization and reduced costs.
- Agility: Lightbits enabled the company to “lift and shift” workloads across different clouds, including their private cloud, seamlessly maintaining the high availability and uptime essential for eCommerce cloud solutions.
Implementation: High-Performance, Resilient, and Scalable
The implementation involved deploying tens of clusters across multiple data centers, each with 16 dual-instance, high-performance storage servers. By running two instances of Lightbits on a single physical machine, the company achieved 25-30% higher performance per server. The infrastructure was built using Lenovo servers and Micron NVMe storage.
This setup not only delivered the required performance but also provided robust data replication capabilities for enterprise-class resilience. The organization can now leverage different replication scenarios tailored to specific workloads, ensuring data integrity and availability across their entire operation, especially critical for their Kubernetes deployment.
The Results: Unleashing the Power of eCommerce with Lightbits
By adopting the Lightbits software-defined storage platform, the eCommerce giant has transformed its IT infrastructure into a model of efficiency and flexibility. The platform supports the company’s massive and growing workloads, enabling it to process vast amounts of data quickly and effectively. With Lightbits eCommerce cloud solutions, they’ve achieved:
- Improved Utilization: Thanks to thin provisioning and compression, they’ve dramatically increased storage efficiency within their private cloud.
- Enhanced Agility: Workloads can now be easily moved between different clouds, including their private cloud, ensuring high availability and reducing the risk of downtime.
- Cost Savings: The ability to scale storage independently of compute has led to significant reductions in operational costs, optimizing the performance of their Kubernetes workloads.
Customer quote:
“Lightbits has become the de facto EBS (Elastic Block Storage) platform for us, delivering the performance and scalability we need to support our most demanding applications.” — Sr Director of Cloud infrastructure
In a world where speed and efficiency are paramount, the Lightbits software-defined storage solution has given this eCommerce leader the tools they need to stay ahead of the competition and continue their rapid growth.
For more information on how Lightbits can help modernize your cloud infrastructure, contact us to learn more.
