VMblog Expert Interview: First software-defined NVMe®/TCP storage solution becomes available for VMware users
Original article featured on VMBlog.com
Lightbits Labs, a leader in NVMe®-based, scalable and software-defined elastic block storage that is fully optimized on Intel hardware for private and edge clouds, just announced that its LightOS product has been certified for VMware vSphere 7 Update 3. To find out more, VMblog spoke with Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightbits.
VMblog: Can you start things off by giving us a quick explanation of your latest announcement?
Kam Eshghi: Of course. We just announced that Lightbits LightOS is fully certified with VMware vSphere 7 Update 3, making LightOS the industry’s first software-defined NVMe®/TCP storage solution for VMware. This is exciting and a real game-changer because it’s a big step towards an end-to-end NVMe® solution. This announcement takes the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency of LightOS that is optimized for Intel hardware and extends it to VMware vSphere providing users the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability while lowering cost. The intelligent flash management of LightOS improves QLC flash endurance by up to twenty times, so users get the benefits of being able to utilize more economical flash while also improving its utility.
VMblog: And I see you have leveraged your partnership with Intel in this regard as well. Care to explain?
Eshghi: We’ve been doing a lot of work with Intel both in terms of co-engineering, co-marketing and joint engagement with customers and they are also an investor in Lightbits. LightOS is optimized for Intel’s high-performance hardware, their 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators, Intel Optane Pmem and 100Gb Ethernet Network Adapters. LightOS with Intel technologies offers the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability for VMware vSphere® while at the same time lowering TCO.
VMblog: What was the process behind this VMware certification?
Eshghi: Lightbits created NVMe®/TCP, developing a disaggregated storage solution that is easy to deploy at scale while delivering performance similar to local flash. Jointly, the companies are advancing cloud-native NVMe®/TCP operating models with a solution that delivers efficiency, simplicity, and high performance. As a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and Day 0 design partner, Intel and Lightbits collaborated extensively with VMware on the development and testing of the new vSphere NVMe®/TCP feature.
VMblog: And what differentiates LightOS from its competitors especially given the NVMe®/TCP foundation?
Eshghi: In VMware environments, LightOS provides a range of benefits. At its core, LightOS is easy to consume over TCP/IP networks using standard protocols and drivers. This ensures it seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructure and VMware environments.
From a flexibility perspective, its software-only, disaggregated architecture allows for independent scaling of storage and compute. Essentially, it runs on any commodity hardware selected by the customer, providing a range of use cases. Because it’s NVMe®-based storage, it delivers high IOPS and low latency with performance that is equivalent to local flash without proprietary hardware and rigid capacity and performance constraints.
One of the key things that organizations want today is high availability. LightOS has rich data services such as SSD-level Elastic RAID, per-volume replication, multi-tenancy, snapshots, clones, remote monitoring, and more that result in highly resilient, high availability storage that extends across the entire virtualized platform.
VMblog: Practically, from a business perspective, what does all this translate to?
Eshghi: The legacy storage technologies prevalent in the datacenter today no longer offer organizations a competitive advantage–there are too many inefficiencies. Storage silos and stranded capacity as well as high management overhead still proliferate. To extract value from data, modern cloud-native applications demand higher performance and lower latencies. But even that’s not enough, at the same time the datacenter has to be more agile and efficient.
Lightbits’ high performance, highly available storage solution, running on Intel technologies, combined with vSphere with in-box support for NVMe®/TCP delivers an end-to-end NVMe® solution. The takeaway from this announcement is that organizations with private clouds and hybrid clouds, cloud service providers, and financial service providers can now realize the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency benefits of a combined solution from VMware, Lightbits, and Intel.
VMblog: Can VMblog readers read more to find out how to benefit from LightOS for themselves?
Eshghi: The companies are jointly presenting a breakout session, “Cloud Everywhere Transformation: NVMe®/TCP Operating Models on Data Center and Cloud,” at VMworld 2021. To register or learn more about the session, click here.
We also have a live webinar on October 13th, “Accelerate Your Cloud-Native Applications with NVMe®/TCP for Virtualized Environments.” To book a seat for that event, click here.
And there are several resources available on our Web site, and readers can start on this page that examines the Lightbits, Intel, and VMware partnership in greater detail.
Lightbits Labs, a leader in NVMe®-based, scalable and software-defined elastic block storage that is fully optimized on Intel hardware for private and edge clouds, just announced that its LightOS product has been certified for VMware vSphere 7 Update 3. To find out more, VMblog spoke with Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightbits.
VMblog: Can you start things off by giving us a quick explanation of your latest announcement?
Kam Eshghi: Of course. We just announced that Lightbits LightOS is fully certified with VMware vSphere 7 Update 3, making LightOS the industry’s first software-defined NVMe®/TCP storage solution for VMware. This is exciting and a real game-changer because it’s a big step towards an end-to-end NVMe® solution. This announcement takes the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency of LightOS that is optimized for Intel hardware and extends it to VMware vSphere providing users the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability while lowering cost. The intelligent flash management of LightOS improves QLC flash endurance by up to twenty times, so users get the benefits of being able to utilize more economical flash while also improving its utility.
VMblog: And I see you have leveraged your partnership with Intel in this regard as well. Care to explain?
Eshghi: We’ve been doing a lot of work with Intel both in terms of co-engineering, co-marketing and joint engagement with customers and they are also an investor in Lightbits. LightOS is optimized for Intel’s high-performance hardware, their 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators, Intel Optane Pmem and 100Gb Ethernet Network Adapters. LightOS with Intel technologies offers the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability for VMware vSphere® while at the same time lowering TCO.
VMblog: What was the process behind this VMware certification?
Eshghi: Lightbits created NVMe®/TCP, developing a disaggregated storage solution that is easy to deploy at scale while delivering performance similar to local flash. Jointly, the companies are advancing cloud-native NVMe®/TCP operating models with a solution that delivers efficiency, simplicity, and high performance. As a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and Day 0 design partner, Intel and Lightbits collaborated extensively with VMware on the development and testing of the new vSphere NVMe®/TCP feature.
VMblog: And what differentiates LightOS from its competitors especially given the NVMe®/TCP foundation?
Eshghi: In VMware environments, LightOS provides a range of benefits. At its core, LightOS is easy to consume over TCP/IP networks using standard protocols and drivers. This ensures it seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructure and VMware environments.
From a flexibility perspective, its software-only, disaggregated architecture allows for independent scaling of storage and compute. Essentially, it runs on any commodity hardware selected by the customer, providing a range of use cases. Because it’s NVMe®-based storage, it delivers high IOPS and low latency with performance that is equivalent to local flash without proprietary hardware and rigid capacity and performance constraints.
One of the key things that organizations want today is high availability. LightOS has rich data services such as SSD-level Elastic RAID, per-volume replication, multi-tenancy, snapshots, clones, remote monitoring, and more that result in highly resilient, high availability storage that extends across the entire virtualized platform.
VMblog: Practically, from a business perspective, what does all this translate to?
Eshghi: The legacy storage technologies prevalent in the datacenter today no longer offer organizations a competitive advantage–there are too many inefficiencies. Storage silos and stranded capacity as well as high management overhead still proliferate. To extract value from data, modern cloud-native applications demand higher performance and lower latencies. But even that’s not enough, at the same time the datacenter has to be more agile and efficient.
Lightbits’ high performance, highly available storage solution, running on Intel technologies, combined with vSphere with in-box support for NVMe®/TCP delivers an end-to-end NVMe® solution. The takeaway from this announcement is that organizations with private clouds and hybrid clouds, cloud service providers, and financial service providers can now realize the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency benefits of a combined solution from VMware, Lightbits, and Intel.
VMblog: Can VMblog readers read more to find out how to benefit from LightOS for themselves?
Eshghi: The companies are jointly presenting a breakout session, “Cloud Everywhere Transformation: NVMe®/TCP Operating Models on Data Center and Cloud,” at VMworld 2021. To register or learn more about the session, click here.
We also have a live webinar on October 13th, “Accelerate Your Cloud-Native Applications with NVMe®/TCP for Virtualized Environments.” To book a seat for that event, click here.
And there are several resources available on our Web site, and readers can start on this page that examines the Lightbits, Intel, and VMware partnership in greater detail.
Chief Strategy Officer at Lightbits Labs, a software-defined storage company bringing hyperscale agility & efficiency to all. Read Kam Eshghi’s full executive profile here.
