Recently, Lightbits Labs in collaboration with Crusoe Cloud (“Crusoe”) took an exciting step forward. Crusoe Cloud launched the Custom Images feature using Data Mobility Services (DMS) by Lightbits, a high-performance block storage.
DMS, powered by Lightbits high-performance block storage, enables faster data access, simplified volume and snapshot management, and greater resiliency at scale. It’s designed to reduce operational complexity and storage cost while keeping your workloads running smoothly. It also helps minimize blast radius footprints, improving workload isolation and overall system reliability.
Data Mobility Service and Thick Cloning
DMS is a standalone service that runs in a dedicated container outside the Lightbits cluster, managing the movement of volumes and snapshots. A key enabler of DMS is Lightbits’ powerful Thick Clone feature. This feature is specifically designed to streamline image creation and management for modern AI Cloud environments. Volumes can easily be cloned by leveraging all available resources across the cluster. This is important because in large-scale virtualized deployments with a shared Virtual Machine (VM) baseline, DMS can rapidly create multiple cloned volumes that are evenly distributed across all cluster nodes. It not only unlocks the full performance potential of the Lightbits cluster and balances the workload more efficiently, but also reduces the blast radius of potential failures. As a result, Crusoe’s customers can reliably run their workloads without disruption.
High-level illustration of the Lightbits DMS architecture
By leveraging Thick Clones, Crusoe’s customers now have the flexibility to build from custom image templates and take snapshots at any stage of the AI data pipeline. DMS capability enhancements are already in the pipeline, to include asynchronous replication, incremental copies, and advanced data protection features. These enhancements will further simplify cluster management, enable fast and flexible resource provisioning, unlock new cross-cluster data mobility use cases, and optimize resource utilization and allocation.
Lightbits offers best-in-class software-defined storage, delivering the industry’s best price/performance value. The storage software scales to hundreds of petabytes and achieves up to 75M IOPS with consistent sub-millisecond tail latency, making it ideal for vector and other AI-centric databases. Designed natively for NVMe over TCP, Lightbits maximizes resource efficiency with no proprietary hardware, streamlines storage management, and uses 5X less hardware than Ceph Storage, lowering energy consumption and aligning with sustainability goals. To support mixed workload environments, a single Lightbits cluster provides multi-tenancy with Quality of Service capabilities to prevent resource hogging.
If you’re curious to dive deeper into how Crusoe built an AI Cloud service with Lightbits, we highly recommend checking out Crusoe’s blog. And to learn more about Lightbits’ Thick Clones, you can read our feature release blog or book a product demonstration today.
About Crusoe:
Crusoe is a true pioneer in the AI cloud space, powering its data centers with a unique combination of stranded and clean energy resources to lower the cost and environmental impact of AI cloud computing. Crusoe’s Series D investment round secured hundreds of millions and cements their mission to build the largest AI data centers in the world, built to industry-leading standards of efficiency and reliability. The collaboration between Crusoe and Lightbits started in 2022. It strengthened more recently with the announcement of an expansion of elastic block services, which provide support for customers with AI workloads at scale. The collaboration reaches new heights with the launch of DMS, empowering customers with more accessible, secure, and efficient data management.
