We’re thrilled to announce the release of Lightbits v3.8.1 cloud data platform. This release brings a multitude of enhancements and optimizations, further refining our platform to deliver an unparalleled storage experience for both private and public cloud environments.
Incremental Backup to Azure Blob:
This release marks a significant milestone as Lightbits on Azure now offers incremental backup and restore capabilities for Lightbits volumes to/from Azure Blob Service. This enhancement revolutionizes data protection and enables multi-region capabilities, elevating user confidence and fortifying storage infrastructure resilience.
Azure Managed Application Enhancements:
Lightbits on Azure now provides additional cluster information in the outputs of the Managed Application, improving overall customer experience.
Enhanced Capabilities for Azure VMware Solution (AVS):
In this update, we introduce several new features with Lightbits for AVS. These include the ability to manage all available snapshots of VMFS datastores, support for tagging and creating VMFS datastores, and seamless management functionalities such as creating, deleting, and listing VMFS datastores via the API. Additionally, users now have the capability to create snapshots of VMFS datastores, disconnect ESXi hosts from targets, and conveniently mount/unmount datastores using the REST API. These enhancements ensure streamlined storage management within AVS environments.
Log Collection Improvements:
In this release, our Ansible playbook has been updated to include a revamped log-collector playbook. This playbook now collects logs using the system log script and, where missing, it utilizes the uploaded one. Logs are efficiently organized and dumped into a directory on the Ansible host, simplifying log management and troubleshooting. For more details, refer to the new log collector MD file.
Proactive Maintenance (Technology Preview)
Continuing from our previous 3.7 release, our cluster manager introduces Proactive Node Evacuation, now available for technology preview. This feature empowers users with the capability to safeguard their data during server maintenance or disable operations. Additionally, we’ve implemented automatic abort for ongoing data migrations, enhancing the efficiency of cluster management tasks. Furthermore, users now have the ability to cancel data eviction in progress, providing greater flexibility and control over their storage operations.
Installation and System Enhancements:
We’ve made significant improvements to the installation process, streamlining it with added dependencies and support for non-root users, guaranteeing a smooth setup experience across various environments. Moreover, we’ve enhanced the performance of our control path services, ensuring optimal operation and delivering new value to our users.
Simpler Software Upgrades:
Starting from this release, it is now possible to skip one version when upgrading, streamlining the upgrade process for users. This highly requested feature enhances flexibility and ease of maintenance.
Short Release Cycles:
We are committed to delivering upgrades every two months to provide continuous innovation and value to our customers. This is the cornerstone of our goal of remaining agile and responsive to our customers’ needs and drives our ongoing efforts to deliver enhanced features, performance optimizations, and cutting-edge solutions in a timely manner. We are proud to uphold this commitment and remain steadfast in our mission to provide unparalleled storage solutions that drive success for our customers.
This release marks another significant step forward in our journey to provide cutting-edge storage solutions tailored to your evolving needs. Stay tuned for more updates in 2024, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need assistance with your storage infrastructure. Also, don’t forget to join our new community hub on Slack, called Lightbits Hub. It’s a virtual community where Lightbits users and developers can come together to share their experiences, insights, and expertise in working with Lightbits. Collaboration and learning among like-minded professionals is the goal.