Customers often struggle to provide sufficient performance, especially high IOPS and consistently low latency, for their most demanding backend database workloads.
Many built their cloud-native infrastructure—whether virtualized with OpenStack or containerized with Kubernetes—using open-source storage solutions such as Ceph storage. While adequate for small deployments, CEPH becomes unsustainable as the infrastructure scales to hundreds or thousands of servers. It can consume up to a third of the total server estate. This is particularly problematic when demanding workloads require sustained performance, such as 10-20 IOPS per GB. For instance, a single 5TB volume could demand 100K IOPS. Simply adding more storage server hardware is a temporary fix; a larger CEPH cluster introduces tuning complexities and maintenance nightmares, making it an infrastructure operations challenge.
Lightbits Offers a New Block Storage Paradigm
Lightbits delivers an end-to-end NVMe enterprise-class block storage solution. Based on the NVMe over TCP storage protocol (later ratified as an industry standard), Lightbits provides immense power (up to 10M IOPS from a 4-node cluster), flexibility, and simplicity, leading to significant cost and operational benefits.
Key features include:
- API-Driven Integration: Lightbits’ in-house drivers for OpenStack (Cinder) and Kubernetes (CSI) expose all enterprise-class capabilities directly to the orchestration platforms.
- Simple Deployment: The initial setup requires only four nodes. After integration into the orchestration layer—by creating a new volume type (OpenStack) or storage class (Kubernetes)—storage management remains familiar and straightforward.
Driving Down Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
The efficiency of Lightbits is staggering. In a recent customer environment involving a Postgres database, we tested the following comparison:
| Setup | Hardware | Performance |
|---|---|---|
| CEPH | 40 nodes, 960 NVMe SSDs (24 per node) | 37,000 Transactions per Second (TPS) |
| Lightbits | 4 nodes, 36 NVMe SSDs (9 per node) | 48,000 Transactions per Second (TPS) |
Lightbits delivered superior performance (48K TPS vs. 37K TPS) while drastically reducing the hardware footprint from 40 storage servers to just 4—a savings that is almost unbelievable but has been proven repeatedly in real customer environments worldwide. Since the customer in our example case has already invested in 40x of those servers, imagine what Lightbits can do with them.
Therefore, Lightbits challenges anyone with a large CEPH environment:
“Give us 4 of your CEPH nodes and let us solve your block storage performance challenges!”
Let’s start exploring what Lightbits has to offer for your environment!
Additional resources available on this topic:
- Whitepaper: Lightbits vs Ceph Storage
- On Demand Webinar: The Next Evolution Beyond Ceph
- Customer Case Study