At Lightbits we have been embarking on a Cloud First journey to help customers in the public cloud simplify and reduce costs to meet their high-performance storage needs. The public cloud affords customers many choices when it comes to storage options, and when it comes to higher-performance use cases such as databases, customers tend to leverage a provisioned IOPS model, mostly to ensure that dedicated performance is available for highly transactional workloads.
From our testing and with the help of some of our larger customers, we are seeing that the benefits of Lightbits on the public cloud from a performance perspective have been exceptional. When we start to compare our test results vs a provisioned IOPS offering, the results of that testing continue to prove that when it comes to performance, Lightbits offers lower latency, higher performance, lower cost, and predictability that surpasses native public cloud high-performance storage offerings.
In this latest round of testing, we deployed a 3-node Lightbits cluster on AWS i4i.metal instances. These provide 30TB of NVMe® backed storage and higher speed network bandwidth at 75Gbps to each of the instances. We then connected worker instances to the Lightbits cluster and ran several synthetic workloads to simulate storage traffic utilizing a variety of block sizes and running several different tests to determine how well Lightbits stacked up to the provisioned IOPS offerings.
As we can see in the figure, for small block workloads, Lightbits provides 2.08X to 2.14X better IOPS over the provisioned IOPS offering (AWS EBS IO2 Block Express). Furthermore, the provisioned IOPS offering has average latencies that are 2.06X to 2.13X higher than the Lightbits latencies. For large block workloads, the throughput of both options was roughly the same.
Generally, Lightbits showed the ability to push higher levels of IOPS on identical tests compared to a provisioned IOP solution, and in nearly all scenarios was the more performant option.
The cost of running high-performance applications in the cloud is a key concern when considering cloud adoption and migration. So, performance is something that Lightbits excels at, but a secondary concern for high-performance workloads in the cloud are the costs involved in deploying and using native storage offerings. The below models show how Lightbits compares to a provisioned IOPS volume in cost terms of cost per month:
In this example, we are running 3 replicas of the sample data, with a cluster sitting at 80% utilization and 4 TiB volumes that are not running active snapshots or compression at the volume level. (Lightbits offers rich data services such as compression and thin provisioning, as well as no-cost snapshots). The goal here is to show a functionally equivalent volume across both platforms and including the cost of each as the performance increases to show the breakeven points for performance as well as to illustrate the ability of Lightbits to provide high performance with predictable and lower costs as things scale.
Some of the key findings that can help you determine if Lightbits storage is the right choice for your high-performance cloud workloads:
- Lightbits can provide a lower TCO when considering a TiB IO2 Block Express volume of 4TiB for any level of provisioned IOPS over 60,000 – even when looking at a cluster that’s built from Pay as you Go instances.
- If Lightbits instances are deployed on reserved instances, then Lightbits further reduces TCO and provides value when assigning IO2 volumes over 20,000 provisioned IOPS.
- At 256,000 IOPS, Lightbits with reserved instances can reduce cost by 80% per 4TiB volume.
Since Lightbits creates a “pool” of IOPS for the cluster, the cost stays consistently low as the required performance increases until the available IOPS for the number of nodes deployed is utilized. Once this occurs, you can add another node to further increase the cluster performance and capacity. This combined with the ability to connect any compute instance offers a level of flexibility for cases where the provisioned IOPS model does not pair with the desired compute instances. Furthermore, Lightbits does not charge for data services, snapshots, or clones, they are all included in the core offering.
If you find this compelling and are looking for alternatives to provisioned IOPS storage offerings in the cloud, we offer a 30-day trial for current or new AWS customers, follow this link to start a trial, or reach out to sales@lightbitslabs.com to speak with a member of our team.
