On September 29, 2021, Lightbits announced that we completed the rigorous certification of our NVMe/TCP disaggregated storage solution with VMware vSphere® 7 Update 3. This certification represents another significant milestone in Lightbits history, starting with our founding in 2016, our leadership in developing the NVMe/TCP spec and its successful ratification in 2018, to our shipment of the industry’s first NVMe/TCP disaggregated storage solution in 2019. Now, VMware customers have full access to the revolutionary enhancements in NVMe/TCP, along with a set of enterprise data features.
As a result of this certification, VMware customers can leverage the efficiency, agility, and ease of use benefits of the Lightbits data platform for their Tanzu environments also. With Lightbits, your Tanzu environment is capable of supporting mixed workloads from potentially 1,000’s of microservices, all making data and control plane API requests simultaneously.
Why is this important?
Containerization with Kubernetes is unleashing innovation for applications and the infrastructure they rely upon. With Kubernetes, developers can now create applications that are decomposed into microservices. In the virtualized world, applications are monolithic. This means all the code is contained within a single application or a series of common libraries which are typically compiled into the monolithic executable. But in Kubernetes, that same application could be decomposed into 100’s if not 1,000’s of microservices. While this represents a major step forward in terms of code reusability, it poses yet another level of new challenges for data storage which supports Kubernetes. This new challenge is what I am calling the I/O Tornado because it can be orders of magnitude more problematic for data storage systems. Imagine 1,000’s of microservices needing access to persistent storage at simultaneous and random times. This presents a perfect storm, an I/O Tornado.
VMware Tanzu is VMware’s answer for Kubernetes. Lightbits has been working with VMware to bring all the benefits of our NVMe/TCP data platform not just to vSphere, but also to Tanzu. Lightbits is available to VMware Tanzu via the Container Native Storage-Container Storage Interface (CNS-CSI) within vSphere.
Why is this important, and why is Lightbits unique in this perspective?
As more and more organizations deploy cloud-native applications using Kubernetes technology, the I/O Tornado challenge will become more and more pronounced for data storage systems. With full-scale production systems supporting 1,000’s of microservices with varying I/O workloads, a new data storage solution is needed. Yes, you could simply throw flash storage at the problem to solve the I/O challenge, but that comes with sacrifices in terms of efficiency and total cost of ownership. You also need to consider that you may have 1,000’s of PODs making API calls to the control plane, which poses additional challenges. With Lightbits data platform, Tanzu applications not only have access to super-fast flash storage, but they also benefit from simplicity and efficiency. Because Lightbits is based upon standard Ethernet TCP/IP networking, no special configurations are required. You can be immediately up and running with your standard gigabit Ethernet networking today. Lightbits Intelligent Flash Management is a set of unique features which optimize flash storage utilization and increase flash storage durability.
The power of Lightbits is easily accessible for both traditional ESXi applications as well as Tanzu applications. With native ESXi support, there are no special add-ons or modules to worry about. With vCenter integration, you can manage and monitor your Lightbits clusters and provision volumes with ease. Migrating from legacy storage to Lightbits is as simple as performing a storage vMotion.
Figure 1. Managing Lightbits from Tanzu
As the world transitions from virtualized applications to containerized applications, it is important to understand the impacts of these changes, especially from a data storage standpoint. Lightbits has recognized these challenges and is prepared to help you handle them before they become issues.
Lightbits helps solve both data plane and control plane performance challenges arising from the I/O Tornado, in addition to making your flash storage infrastructure more efficient.
To request a demo of Lightbits, please visit https://www.lightbitslabs.com/ready/
Additional Resources:
- VMWare® VSphere® Announcement: High Performance, Highly Available Storage for VMWare VSphere
- VMUG Roundtable: How to get Performance and Portability Without Compromise – NVMe based block storage over TCP
- On Demand Webinar: Accelerate Your Cloud-Native Applications with NVMe®/TCP for Virtualized Environments (Featuring Intel and VMWare)
- Lightbits Expand Scale-Out Disaggregated Storage Capabilities for Private, Hybrid, and Edge Deployments
