This blog first appeared on the MI&S website on December 4, 2024, and is reprinted courtesy of MI&S.
Author: Matt Kimball, Moor Insights & Strategy senior data center analyst covering servers and storage
When discussing modernizing the data center, storage is one of the foundational elements that, while critical to success, is often overlooked. Legacy storage infrastructure can and will impact the performance of data-driven environments. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that storage must be the first consideration of any modernization effort.
This research looks at the role of block storage in the cloud environment and how companies like Lightbits Labs deliver performance, scale, and cost savings realized by some of the largest organizations.
To Modernize Or Not: Storage Is Fundamental
The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom nearly a year ago kicked off a discussion around modernization. This highly disruptive act has caused many organizations to reconsider the future state of their datacenter, with or without VMware.
There are many different estimates for how many enterprise IT organizations are having these internal conversations. Based on the estimates I’ve seen, it’s safe to say the vast majority are at least considering significant data center modernization projects. In fact, I can say that every IT leader I’ve spoken with is considering what their move-forward plan in this area looks like. By this point, it’s less about VMware specifically and more about the broader need for modernization and cloud-native environments. It’s undoubtedly a healthy and necessary debate for internal IT organizations, as a sense of complacency and incrementalism seems to have crept in over the last 10 years or so.
There are two key questions facing the enterprise: What does our modernization plan look like? And what technologies should we deploy to meet the needs of today and tomorrow across the organization?
For those organizations that have decided to embark on the modernization journey, the first decision is whether to build a cloud or deploy a cloud. In other words, is it best to build a cloud from the ground up using OpenStack, or deploy a cloud environment on Nutanix, Red Hat OpenShift, or some other solution stack? In either case, virtualized and containerized environments are only as performant and responsive as the supporting infrastructure. In turn, Infrastructure is only as performant as its storage environment.
Unfortunately, storage is often treated as a secondary consideration, and many organizations fail to realize the full potential of their modernization efforts because of slower spinning disks and the lack of a storage OS designed for performance and scale.
Lightbits Labs and Performant Block
While it is fairly obvious that storage performance can (and will) impact application performance, it’s important to consider whether the application in question is an e-commerce site performing tens of thousands of transactions per minute or an AI cloud delivering services in real-time to its customer base. Scale matters and performant scale is even more important.
Lightbits Labs is a software-defined storage (SDS) provider that powers some of the largest and most demanding environments—everything from e-commerce to cloud service providers. It achieves this through NVMe/TCP, a technology the company invented and has received several patents for. In this environment, the NVMe protocol is routed over Ethernet using the TCP/IP protocol suite. This allows high-performance clusters without the need for specialized networking and hardware.
Alternative approaches have their limitations. Direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SAN) are popular models; however, each comes with a set of challenges. In the case of DAS, it’s an inflexibility that can lead to inefficiencies as applications become wedded to servers and storage. In the case of SANs, it’s a matter of cost, as proprietary hardware and specialized networking come at a premium.
These challenges are avoided with SDS in general and Lightbits in particular. In comparison to DAS, Lightbits can deliver higher utilization for lower TCO and better utilization of flash for longer endurance of QLC. Compared to SANs, Lightbits NVMe/TCP delivers high performance without the proprietary hardware stack.
Performance is a big deal for Lightbits Labs. In fact, its claim of scaling up to 75 million IOPS (input/output operations per second) at sub-1ms latency puts it in a performance leadership position. This SDS solution outperforms CEPH, the more broadly deployed open-source block solution for data-intensive cloud environments. Like CEPH, Lightbits can be seamlessly integrated into OpenStack and managed through Cinder, Nova, and Glance through the Cinder API.
Even for legacy virtualization, there is a Lightbits play. The company’s certified solution supports VMware and KVM environments as the back-end SDS. In fact, Lightbits can even run alongside vSAN and be used as a vMotion target in vSphere. Whether this support will continue as the changes in Broadcom’s portfolio impact existing implementations is not yet known.
Meeting the Needs of Data-Driven Workloads
The enterprise IT infrastructure market is constantly changing. However, the confluence of several factors is causing organizations to consider how best to support the business’s needs today and in the future. The cloud operating model is still how organizations can achieve the agility required to meet the needs of the data-driven workloads populating the data center. How that cloud operating model is constructed—what the underlying compute, networking, and storage environments are comprised of—matters.
Storage, in particular, is the building block upon which everything depends—performance, resilience, and both of these at scale. Fast, resilient storage can help deliver results faster, be it for AI inferencing or tens of thousands of financial transactions per second.
Companies like Lightbits Labs are, in many ways, the innovation engines that drive change in the industry. While they may not have the brand awareness of some of the bigger players in the market, they nonetheless power some of the largest and most performant clouds and enterprise data centers in the market. In other words, the most performance- and scale-sensitive organizations deploy Lightbits because of its performance, scale, and cost. Which means it’s probably worth taking a look at for any organization with these high-end needs.
