Are you looking to take your OpenShift Virtualization environment to the next level? Look no further than Lightbits! In this blog post, we’ll explore how Lightbits can transform your virtualized infrastructure, providing unparalleled performance, scalability, and efficiency. Let’s dive in and see how our open-source CSI plugin makes integration a breeze while delivering substantial business value.
Before we delve into the benefits of Lightbits, let’s quickly recap what OpenShift Virtualization is. OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of Red Hat OpenShift that allows you to run and manage virtual machines alongside containers on the same platform. It brings traditional virtualization workloads into the modern, container-based world of Kubernetes, enabling you to modernize your applications and infrastructure gradually. With OpenShift Virtualization, you can run both containerized and virtualized workloads side by side, managed through the same familiar OpenShift interface.
Lightbits is a software-defined storage solution designed for high-performance, cloud-native applications. We’ve built Lightbits from the ground up to deliver the speed and efficiency of direct-attached SSDs with the flexibility and manageability of networked storage. Our secret sauce? We’re the inventors of NVMe® over TCP, a protocol that allows you to get near-local NVMe performance over standard TCP/IP networks. This means you can have your cake and eat it too – enjoy the performance of local SSDs with the scalability and ease of management of networked storage, all without specialized networking hardware.
At Lightbits, we believe in the power of open source. That’s why we’ve developed an open-source Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin that integrates seamlessly with OpenShift Virtualization. This plugin allows you to easily provision and manage high-performance persistent storage for your virtual machines, making deployment and scaling a breeze. With our CSI plugin, you can leverage the full power of Lightbits storage within your OpenShift environment, ensuring that your virtualized workloads have access to the performance and features they need to thrive.
Diagram 1: How Lightbits integrates with OpenShift
One of the key challenges in virtualized environments is maintaining consistent performance as you scale. Lightbits tackles this head-on by delivering scalability to more than 75 million IOPS with consistent sub-millisecond latency. This means that as your workload grows, you won’t have to worry about performance bottlenecks or degraded user experience. Whether you’re running a handful of VMs or thousands, Lightbits ensures that each one gets the storage performance it needs, when it needs it. This level of performance enables you to consolidate more workloads onto fewer servers, maximizing your hardware investment and simplifying your infrastructure.
In today’s competitive landscape, optimizing costs is crucial. Lightbits helps you achieve this by reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by at least 50% compared to other solutions like Storage Area Networks (SANs), Direct Attached Storage (DAS), or Ceph. This significant cost reduction is achieved through a combination of factors. First, our built-in, zero-cost data reduction with flash optimization helps you store more data in less physical space. Second, we extend SSD endurance, reducing replacement costs and minimizing disruptions. Lastly, by allowing you to use commodity hardware and leveraging your existing TCP/IP network, we eliminate the need for expensive, specialized equipment. All of these factors combine to deliver a storage solution that not only performs better but also costs less to operate over time.
In today’s 24/7 business environment, downtime is simply not an option. Lightbits ensures your virtualized infrastructure stays up and running with built-in failure protection at every level. Our elastic RAID and replication capabilities provide robust data protection, while our self-healing features mean that the system can automatically recover from many types of failures without manual intervention. Moreover, we support non-disruptive rolling upgrades, allowing you to keep your storage infrastructure up-to-date without impacting running workloads. This comprehensive approach to resilience means you can confidently run even your most mission-critical workloads on Lightbits storage.
In the fast-paced world of DevOps, agility is key. Lightbits empowers your teams by enabling rapid spin-up and spin-down of services. This means developers can quickly provision the storage they need for new projects or testing environments, without waiting for IT to allocate resources. Our ability to support thousands of workloads simultaneously ensures that even large development teams can work efficiently without running into resource constraints. Furthermore, our dynamic capacity expansion allows you to seamlessly add storage as your needs grow, without disrupting ongoing operations. This flexibility and agility translate directly into faster development cycles and quicker time-to-market for your products and services.
Say goodbye to complex storage management. With Lightbits, you can use commodity hardware from any vendor, avoiding vendor lock-in and giving you the freedom to choose the hardware that best fits your needs and budget. Our solution leverages your existing TCP/IP network infrastructure, eliminating the need for specialized networking equipment or complex configurations. As a software-defined solution, Lightbits is easy to deploy and manage, reducing the operational burden on your IT team. This simplicity extends to scaling as well – adding capacity or performance is as simple as adding more commodity servers to your cluster.
The benefits of Lightbits aren’t just theoretical – our customers have seen remarkable results in practice. Cloud service providers have reduced setup time from days to minutes, allowing them to respond more quickly to customer demands. E-commerce giants have improved utilization and increased uptime, ensuring a smooth shopping experience even during peak traffic periods. Financial services firms have met strict compliance requirements while delivering the high performance needed for data-intensive applications like real-time trading and risk analysis.
Lightbits is not just storage – it’s a game-changer for your OpenShift Virtualization environment. By leveraging our open-source CSI plugin and harnessing the power of NVMe/TCP, you can transform your infrastructure, boost performance, reduce costs, and stay ahead of the competition. With Lightbits, you’re not just getting a storage solution – you’re getting a partner in your journey to a more efficient, performant, and cost-effective IT infrastructure.
Ready to supercharge your OpenShift Virtualization with Lightbits? Contact us today for a personalized demo and see the difference for yourself!
