In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations are under constant pressure to modernize their data centers. Many are turning to open-source, software-defined cloud models like OpenStack to achieve the flexibility and scalability needed to support diverse applications. However, as these organizations move away from traditional, costly storage appliances, they face the challenge of finding a storage platform that is not only cost-efficient but also easy to manage, flexible, and capable of scaling seamlessly with their growing needs.
The Challenge
The primary challenge for organizations adopting modern data center technologies is ensuring that their storage solutions can keep pace with their growing business demands. OpenStack, an open-source platform that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), enables the management and orchestration of large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources. However, the storage component must be robust enough to deliver a solid user experience, highly elastic, and capable of supporting any application including workloads that are performance-intensive.
Introducing Lightbits: The Next Generation Storage Solution for OpenStack
Lightbits has emerged as a leader in delivering high-performance, software-defined storage tailored for modern data centers. Built from the ground up to be flexible and fast, Lightbits utilizes commodity servers to drive end-to-end NVMe performance, redefining how storage is managed and delivered in cloud-scale environments.
Figure 1: High-level architecture of Lightbits working with OpenStack through Cinder.
When Lightbits storage powers your OpenStack environment, application owners can confidently build, operate, and grow their services. Lightbits enables instant scaling, either vertically or horizontally, without application downtime and without affecting data transfer speeds. This means that your storage footprint can grow seamlessly to keep up with demand.
Moreover, by utilizing commodity hardware, infrastructure teams have the freedom to choose their server vendors, ensuring cost-effectiveness and flexibility. Lightbits’ solution rides on top of the latest networking, server and flash technologies. As the inventors of NVMe/TCP, Lightbits leverages TCP/IP networking to provide a plug-and-play experience, further simplifying deployment and management. The combination of commodity server and network infrastructure with Lightbits’ unique architecture delivers incredible performance while keeping total cost of ownership (TCO) 50% lower than alternative software-defined solutions.
Key Benefits of Lightbits for OpenStack
- Rapid Deployment and Expansion: Spin up new services in minutes and support tens of thousands of workloads. With Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and ubiquitous TCP/IP high-performance networking, you can deploy and scale faster than ever before.
- Best Price/Performance Ratio: Reduce your TCO by 50% or more compared to Ceph storage, achieve up to 4.4M IOPS per Rack Unit, and use commodity hardware from any vendor, all while benefiting from built-in data reduction.
- Versatility for Any Application: With the Lightbits cinder driver for OpenStack and the CSI plugin for Kubernetes, you can ensure consistent application user experience and reliability for your mission-critical applications.
Powering Your Most Critical Applications
Lightbits provides simple, highly available, and scalable block storage for OpenStack environments with the power of NVMe/TCP. Organizations have reported dramatic improvements in application user experience and time to scale, all while maintaining cost efficiency. Here’s a sampling of direct customer quotes:
- “Lightbits has enhanced my scalability for OpenStack”
- “Lightbits is the Goldilocks of storage for OpenStack …it has everything…”
- “Lightbits allows us to run any application on our platform without question; the business is free to choose”
In an ever-changing technology landscape, Lightbits keeps your cloud environment ready for anything. Whether you’re supporting virtual machines through OpenStack and KVM, containers through CSI, or containerized VMs with platforms like OpenShift-V or KubeVirt, Lightbits has you covered.
Ready to Elevate Your Private Cloud?
If you’re ready to build a next-generation private cloud platform that runs every application effortlessly, including the most latency-sensitive and storage-intensive workloads, then Lightbits can help. Contact us today to learn more.
