Lightbits adds snapshots and clones
Lightbits Labs has added snapshot and thin clone functionality to its LightOS software. The company supplies an NVMe SSD array accessed over NVMe/TCP to provide RDMA-class block data access latency and speed over vanillaTCP/IP networks.
LightOS already features thin provisioning, compression, high-availability and data protection. A Lightbits spokesperson told us most legacy vendors provide this functionality already. For customers and proponents of software defined storage over NVMe/TCP, this capability is new and it bolsters the overall value of this approach.
LightOS 2.2 lets users create space-efficient snapshots and clones. It supports up to 1,024 snaps and/or clones on a single volume, and up to 128,000 snapshots and clones per cluster. Making a read-only snapshot needs a few seconds and trace metadata only is retained. Changes applied to the parent volume are reflected in the snapshot in 4K blocks, with corresponding snapshot storage capacity usage.
For backup applications, snapshots can be scheduled, isolated from production workflows, and backed up reliably in the background. You can also quickly and easily revert/restore back to earlier snapshots as needed, helping to maintain operational uptime and Quality of Service (QoS) thresholds that might otherwise be compromised by data loss or corruption events.
Thin clones are writeable snapshots. They consume flash capacity with changes applied to the parent or the clone itself. Whereas 100 clones of a 10GB image would otherwise consume 1TB of storage, LightOS allows you to maintain the 10GB total storage footprint across all 101 images, allocating additional storage capacity to the 100 clones only as changes are applied.
