It gives me great pleasure to announce that Lightbits 3.0.1 has been released and is ready for deployment in your data centers and AWS accounts. Below I cover the main new features in Lightbits 3.0.1 and what you might expect when deploying it.
Lightbits on AWS. Starting with the 3.0.1 release, Lightbits software is available on the AWS Marketplace. Lightbits on AWS offers cost-efficiency, high performance, low latency, and all of the enterprise data services you have come to expect from Lightbits, while running on the AWS public cloud. It’s blazingly fast storage on AWS with up to 90% cost savings! Now you can migrate your on-premises I/O intensive applications to AWS, run Oracle or NoSQL databases and big data analytics. For more information on Lightbits on AWS, see the introduction to Lightbits on AWS we recently published.
Error correction. Few things are scarier than the possibility of silent data corruption. Starting with the 3.0.1 release, Lightbits will automatically detect and recover from silent SSD data corruption. Taking advantage of Lightbits’ elastic-RAID and clustered architecture, where every volume is protected within the server and replicated across multiple cluster nodes by default, we verify on every SSD read that the data has not been corrupted. When we detect corrupted data, we query other cluster nodes for the correct data, fix the corrupted copy of the data, and return it to the user.
Volume resize: Lightbits 3.0.1 adds the ability to shrink a volume’s size. In the Lightbits architecture all volumes are thinly provisioned, so there’s no harm in allocating large volumes, but it’s still useful on occasion to shrink a volume down to limit its total occupancy or if you are a CSP and your customer downgrades their plan to a lower tier.
Backup/restore: Lightbits 3.0.1 adds the ability to backup volumes to S3 and restore them from S3. Taking advantage of Lightbits advanced snapshots and clones capabilities, backing up and restoring a volume is a snap (pun mostly intended) and does not interfere with the volume’s normal operation. This capability is currently only available for Lightbits running on AWS and will be introduced for Lightbits on private clouds in a future release.
For further information on Lightbits 3.0.1, see the Installation and Configuration Guide and the Administrator’s Guide, and don’t hesitate to take it for a spin. For further information on Lightbits in general, see The Lightbits Cloud Data Platform Datasheet.
