As 2025 has come to a close, we are seeing a massive shift in how the enterprise views the data center. Heading into 2026, the strategy isn’t just about “keeping the lights on”—it’s about a full-scale evolution. More and more customers are either beginning or rapidly expanding their journey into modern virtualization platforms like KubeVirt and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (OpenShift-V). The goal is simple: break free from legacy silos and manage VMs and containers on a single, unified, cloud-native control plane.
But as a Sales Engineer, I tell my customers one thing: Your migration will only be as successful as your storage strategy. If you try to power a modern platform like OpenShift-V with legacy SAN hardware, you’re essentially putting a tractor engine in a race car.
The Storage Roadblock
In the old world, we relied on Fibre Channel (FC) SANs. They were reliable but expensive, proprietary, and a nightmare to scale. On the other hand, traditional cloud storage often forces a trade-off: you get flexibility, but you lose the raw “metal” performance that heavy-duty databases require.
This is where Lightbits block storage changes the game. Founded by the inventors of the NVMe/TCP protocol, Lightbits uses a software-defined approach using NVMe® over TCP to deliver the blistering speed of local flash storage over your existing standard Ethernet network. No special cables, no proprietary hardware—just elite performance.
High-Performance Databases: No More Compromises
When I talk to customers about their “tier-one” workloads—things like Oracle, Postgres, MongoDB, or Cassandra—their biggest concern is latency.
Lightbits is built for these mission-critical data loads. Because it’s software-defined, it organizes how data hits the physical SSDs more intelligently than a standard controller. This results in sub-millisecond response times. Whether you’re running a massive SQL cluster or a distributed Cassandra environment, you get:
- Predictable Performance: No “noisy neighbor” issues where one VM slows down the rest.
- Elastic Scaling: Need more IOPS? Just add a node to the cluster. No downtime, no complex re-cabling.
The CSI Driver: Your “Easy Button” for Automation
The bridge between OpenShift and your storage is the Lightbits CSI (Container Storage Interface) Plugin. It implements the CSI v1.2 specification and is fully compatible with Lightbits. While it’s technically sophisticated—comprised of stateless Controller, Node, and Identity services—it’s designed so that once it’s configured, your developers and operations personnel don’t need to be storage experts to use it.
Key Capabilities include:
- Dynamic & Static Provisioning: Support for both pre-provisioned volumes and on-the-fly creation.
- Volume Operations: Effortlessly expand Persistent Volumes (PVs), create snapshots, or clone volumes for Dev/Test.
- Advanced Access: Full support for Raw Block Volumes and Read-Write-Many (RWX) for block-only workloads, giving you the flexibility to run complex stateful apps with confidence.
Live Migration: Performance Under Pressure
One of the most impressive things to see in person is an OpenShift VM migrating between hosts while under a heavy database load. Just like in previous years, in 2026, downtime during maintenance, or really ever, is unacceptable.
In our lab testing using FIO (Flexible I/O Tester), we moved active VMs across a cluster. Because Lightbits is a disaggregated, networked storage solution, the VM maintains its connection to the storage regardless of which host it’s running on.
- Migration Time: A standard VM migrated from “Scheduling” to “Succeeded” in just 16 seconds.
- I/O Consistency: Even while moving across the network, the data disks (backed by Lightbits PVCs) maintained nearly identical IOPS compared to their stationary state.
| Metric | No Migration | During Migration |
|---|---|---|
| Read IOPS | 5,146 | 5,097 |
| Write IOPS | 2,203 | 2,189 |
- Stability: The application remained perfectly responsive for the end user.
Architecture & Implementation
Deploying Lightbits with OpenShift Virtualization follows a streamlined, software-defined path:
- Installation: Deploy the Lightbits CSI Operator via the OperatorHub.
- Configuration: Create a StorageClass. This acts as your “blueprint,” defining performance characteristics and thin provisioning.
- Consumption: Developers claim storage via standard Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs). OpenShift Virtualization then attaches these block devices to the VM as virtio-blk devices.
Recommended Hardware Specs
For a production-ready environment, Lightbits thrives on commodity hardware (Dell, HPE, Supermicro) with:
- CPU: Dual-socket (32+ cores) to handle dedicated I/O “Readers” and “Writers.”
- Networking: 100GbE for the data path to fully saturate the NVMe performance.
- Drives: High-capacity NVMe SSDs.
Bottom Line: Freedom of Choice
By pairing Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Lightbits, you’re building an environment that is faster, cheaper to scale, and much easier to manage. Best of all, you aren’t locked into a proprietary hardware stack. You can run this on high-performance, standard x86 servers from Supermicro, Dell, Lenovo, or HPE.
It’s time to stop managing hardware silos and start managing a high-performance cloud.
Conclusion: Future-Proofing Your Infrastructure
As we move into 2026, the limitations of traditional Fibre Channel SANs are becoming more apparent. They are rigid, expensive, and difficult to scale. By combining Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Lightbits, organizations gain the best of both worlds: the reliability of enterprise virtualization and the high-speed, scalable efficiency of a cloud-native, software-defined storage fabric.
Whether you are consolidating a fleet of databases or building an AI/ML pipeline, the Lightbits + OpenShift architecture delivers the performance and stability required for the next generation of IT.