Let’s Talk Flash

Today, let’s look at one of the biggest clouds, Azure. There are two main types of block storage in the Azure Cloud. The first one is Azure Managed Disks. This is Azure’s native offering and includes types such as Standard SSD, Premium SSD, Premium SSD_V2, and Ultra Disk. I’ve listed these types in order of performance capabilities. Traditional SAN services, such as snapshots and backups, are available with Managed Disks. 

The second type of storage on Azure is the virtual machine with local NVMe devices. These instances are very performant but lack the data protection services available with Azure Managed Disks. 

Summary Azure provides Managed Disks with built‑in data services and high‑performance VMs with local NVMe, notably the Lsv3 series. By combining Lsv3 NVMe and high‑speed networking with Lightbits’ NVMe/TCP software, you can build a disaggregated block storage platform that delivers SAN‑grade features (snapshots, thin provisioning, data reduction) with predictable, scalable price/performance. Lightbits claims up to 1M IOPS per volume, 10x or more performance versus Managed Disks, and up to 80% cost savings versus Ultra Disk. This enables faster, resilient, and cost‑efficient storage for SQL/NoSQL and other intensive workloads on Azure.

With all the cloud offerings such as Block storage types, instance types, and local storage types, it’s hard to know what it all means and how you level set across the hyper-scalers. Azure offers many instance types, and we could spend all day talking about them so let’s narrow it down to a subset that is relevant to us, the ones with NVME® drives. In this case, it’s the Lsv3 series here as they are the latest generation virtual machines supporting local NVMe storage. Here is the breakdown of the Lsv3 series:

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/lsv3-series

Lsv3 VM series provide faster processors, increased networking, and higher remote disk throughput compared to prior-generation storage-optimized VMs. Lsv3-series is powered by a 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology, Intel® Advanced-Vector Extensions 512 (Intel AVX-512), and Intel® Deep Learning Boost, with an all-core turbo clock speed of 3.5 GHz. High-throughput, low-latency, and directly mapped local Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage are features of the Lsv3 VMs and a component of our software-defined storage platform architecture.

These virtual machine series are equipped with NVMe devices and high-speed networking. They are perfect targets to set up a Lightbits cluster on because we can combine these virtual machines with our software to set up a high-performance NVMe/TCP block storage solution. NVMe was designed for high-performance direct-attached PCIe SSDs and was later expanded with NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) to enable remote access to NVMe SSDs over fabrics The industry has widely adopted NVMe-oF as the default protocol for disaggregated storage. NVMe/TCP is the most powerful NVMe-oF technology, providing high performance with reduced deployment costs and design complexity. It extends NVMe across the entire data center using simple and efficient TCP/IP fabric.

Lightbits is a simple, efficient, and agile solution on Azure. It removes the bottlenecks associated with native storage on the public cloud, such as scalable performance and consistently low latency while at the same time offering rich data services and resiliency that enterprises have come to rely on. Lightbits is disaggregated, software-defined storage that allows you to run storage-intensive workloads such as SQL and NoSQL databases on Azure in a secure environment with higher performance, better cost-efficiency, and comprehensive data services (including snapshots) that native cloud storage solutions can’t deliver.

Start allocating data volumes to your applications running on Azure virtual machines in minutes. With Lightbits you can reduce up to 80% of your costs compared to Ultra disk, have greater ROI by delivering 1M IOPS/volume, and achieve 10X or more performance compared to Azure Managed Disks. In addition, using Lightbits you get thin provisioning, data reduction, and snapshots and clones at no extra cost– and our price/performance is linear and scalable so there is predictability to your block storage costs in Azure.

What does this mean to you?

It means you can get all the features and performance you need on either cloud at a better price point than the comparable native cloud offerings. We provide all the enterprise SAN features you have come to rely on in your on-prem world in Azure at no extra cost. If you want to see for yourself what we can do in Azure reach out and we’d be glad to show you.

For more information about Lightbits in the public cloud, check out https://www.lightbitslabs.com/resources for whitepapers, webinars, data sheets, and more.