The most scalable, most efficient high performance storage on Azure is now available for your most challenging data center to cloud migrations
It’s one thing for your company to announce a cloud-first strategy. It’s another thing for you and your team to implement it. The challenge becomes particularly acute when it’s time to upgrade legacy storage arrays that support mission-critical applications. These typically monolithic applications built on Oracle, MySQL, or other databases demand maximum performance and extreme scalability to support thousands of users. They’re the reason you bought expensive flash arrays with expensive service contracts in the first place.
When the contracts for those arrays come up for renewal, you’ll have to decide between keeping its workloads on-prem or migrating them to the cloud, answering tough questions like:
- Can we migrate the storage-intensive workloads to the cloud and still maintain SLAs?
- Can we scale performance and capacity for business growth and stay within our budget?
- Will they have the same availability and data protection in the cloud as on-prem?
- How much time and money will we waste if we migrate to the cloud, and then have to repatriate back on-prem for SLA or cost reasons?
Introducing Lightbits on Microsoft Azure Marketplace
To meet cloud migration challenges, Lightbits delivers high-performance, low-latency block storage that is easy to purchase and use through Azure Marketplace. Lightbits eliminates the performance and cost limitations associated with native cloud storage and provides the essential data services your mission-critical applications require. By clustering virtual machines connected by NVMe® over TCP, Lightbits creates a high-performance “SAN in the cloud” to power your storage-intensive database, analytics, and transactional workloads on Azure–and scale seamlessly and efficiently as application demand grows.
Lightbits is now available through the Marketplace as an Azure Managed Application, making it as straightforward to use as Azure’s native storage offerings. You choose the size of the high-throughput, low latency Lsv3 or Lasv3 virtual machines, and the number of nodes in your cluster, and you’re ready to go.
As a managed service, Lightbits will monitor and control operations behind the scenes within your Azure subscription to ensure availability, performance, and data protection. This includes notifications to promptly inform you when auto-healing is activated, watching storage capacity and performance trends to provide guidance on cluster expansion, proactively doing non-disruptive software upgrades, and installing critical security patches.
Your “SAN in the Cloud” with Complete Enterprise Data Services
Lightbits brings a SAN experience to the cloud. You provision, manage and pay for storage resources as a pool instead of volume by volume. For large-scale migrations, you won’t need to spend weeks sizing each volume individually, and you won’t have to over-provision for maximum expected throughput or capacity, unlike native cloud storage options that work on a direct attached storage model. With Lightbits, you can scale performance and capacity independently.
For even greater efficiency and cost reduction, Lightbits uses thin provisioning and compression to conserve capacity. That means you can size your volumes for the future but only pay for consumption today. You won’t need to predict maximum capacity and pay for underutilization. At the same time, your Lightbits licenses are portable between your Azure account and other public accounts, or private or hybrid cloud use.
Where native cloud storage communicates with applications over a limited bandwidth storage network, Lightbits leverages the network speed of NVMe/TCP to deliver higher throughput and consistent lower latency to your applications. Your users will continue to get an excellent experience during peak usage times. With Lightbits you don’t have to pay for additional provisioned IOPS as you scale services.
The Fastest Block Storage on Azure to Power Demanding Databases
To power your storage-intensive workloads, Lightbits delivers the fastest block storage on Azure with up to 1 million IOPS per volume and consistent sub-millisecond tail latency. This makes it the ideal managed service for Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL databases, Kafka, and other demanding workloads. With Lightbits applications can achieve higher performance using fewer virtual machines, which can reduce any database licensing costs.
As load increases, Lightbits maintains low latency with benchmarks showing tail latency remaining well under the millisecond mark. Lightbits Quality of Service (QoS) ensures your users won’t see any service impacts. In addition, Lightbits can dynamically scale-out or shrink your cluster on-demand, with throughput scaling linearly with the size of your cluster.
Stronger Data Protection and Broader Resilience
Lightbits provides unlimited space-efficient fast snapshots at no additional charge to improve your recovery point and recovery time objectives. Storing more snapshots helps you return operations to a more precise recovery point, while SAN-based snapshots allow you to recover faster than restoring from S3 or Blob backups.
Where native cloud storage provides locally redundant storage only, Lightbits synchronously replicates to three target locations within and/or across availability zones (AZ). Cross-AZ synchronous replication gives your business the resilience to continue your operations during an AZ failure and is also available at no additional charge.
Finally, Lightbits is built with a multi-tenant architecture to meet your enterprise’s best practices or any data compliance requirements for your industry. You can be sure data from different clients are kept completely separate, including the quality of service functions (QoS).
Conclusion
With the new Lightbits on Azure Marketplace offering, you get a maximum performance, highly scalable data platform that’s as resilient and protected as your on-premises storage. It brings a SAN experience to the cloud where storage resources are provisioned and managed as a pool, with Lightbits managing the underlying storage cluster behind the scenes. Now you can migrate your most stubbornly on-premises workloads to Azure with the confidence of knowing they’ll get the resources they need to ensure your users get the best possible experience. All at a cost that’s low and predictable enough to make Lightbits a cloud data platform suitable for all your workloads.
To learn more, join our live launch event for LIghtbits on Azure Marketplace.
Contact Lightbits to learn more about Lightbits for Azure cloud or Azure hybrid environments: info@lightbitslabs.com
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