As organizations modernize their infrastructure and service providers continue to launch new specialty services, they’re looking to hyperscale innovators like Google and Amazon for inspiration. These cloud giants have pioneered disaggregated storage architectures that enable agility, performance, and efficiency at scale. A key lesson from these industry leaders is the immense importance of maximizing CPU utilization.
The central processing unit (CPU) remains the most valuable resource in any compute environment. Every microsecond of latency or I/O wait detracts from your investment in processing power. Hyperscalers understand this and design their infrastructure around maximizing CPU efficiency. One of the most effective strategies they use is disaggregating storage from compute—decoupling flash resources from the CPU so both can scale independently.
With a disaggregated storage model, you can:
- Prevent over-provisioning of storage hardware
- Eliminate CPU stalls caused by slow I/O
- Scale storage and compute independently based on workload needs
- Reduce infrastructure waste and improve performance
Lightbits Labs is bringing hyperscale architecture and benefits to organizations of all sizes with our innovative disaggregated storage platform built for modern workloads.
The Challenge of Direct Attached Storage
To achieve low latency and consistency, cloud-native applications have turned to dedicated resources per server: local flash. These environments may be bare-metal, virtualized or containerized depending on preference, performance, and operational needs. Regardless of the environment, when Flash is inside every application server, the result is poor Flash utilization. This approach leads to significant inefficiencies and wasted resources.
A human must decide how large that flash solid-state drive (SSD) should be.
– Growth (of data) over the life of the server must be estimated
– Most of us select a larger drive than we really need because no one wants to be the one who chooses a drive that’s too small
– In dynamic application environments, not every application needs local flash, and not all applications will need the entire drive
The result is chronic underutilization of the flash resource. If (and when) the drive or host fails, an oversized drive will take longer to recover. For example, recovering an 8-terabyte drive running Cassandra might take between 2 and 6 hours, depending on network speed, utilization, and database load, all the while taxing the network as it recovers.
The Hidden Costs of Poor Flash Utilization:
Local SSDs may seem like a quick fix, but they introduce long-term inefficiencies:
- Capacity guessing: Admins must estimate drive size needs years in advance.
- Overprovisioning: To be safe, they typically choose more capacity than necessary.
- Flash underutilization: Not all applications entirely use local flash, wasting valuable resources.
- Lengthy recovery times: Rebuilding large local drives (e.g., 8TB) can take hours, straining the network and delaying operations.
These problems multiply at scale. That’s why more organizations are turning to software-defined, disaggregated storage to optimize flash utilization and increase resiliency.
Disaggregated Storage Built for Performance and Simplicity
Lightbits directly addresses these challenges by offering a best-in-class disaggregated storage solution built natively for NVMe over TCP—delivering local-like performance with enterprise-grade data services over standard Ethernet infrastructure. It enables users to create high-performance, software-defined storage using commodity servers, decoupling storage and compute so they can scale independently. This alleviates the problem of having too much or too little compute power or storage, leading to greater efficiencies and cost savings, similar to those achieved by hyperscalers.
Lightbits’ solution is also designed for simplicity and seamless integration. It operates over ubiquitous networking protocols, and for users already familiar with TCP/IP, existing knowledge of concepts such as port bonding and routing is directly transferable to storage management. Lightbits also works with standard clients and servers and doesn’t require any proprietary software on client initiators. In fact, major Linux distributions like Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and SUSE all have the NVMe/TCP initiator included.
Enhanced Features and Performance
Recent developments in the Lightbits platform have further solidified its position as a leader in disaggregated storage. The software has a built-in flash manager that optimizes the use of low-cost QLC drives by writing linearly across multiple drives in large blocks, which improves both performance and drive endurance. This intelligent flash management can extend flash endurance by up to 20x. In a single cluster, the solution can achieve up to 75M IOPS and consistent sub-millisecond latency at scale, making it ideal for performance-intensive workloads such as AI/machine learning, real-time analytics, and transactional databases.
Beyond speed, Lightbits includes rich data services that are often lacking in other NVMe-oF solutions. These services, which users are accustomed to in all-flash arrays, include:
- Thin provisioning
- Compression
- Dynamic volumes at scale
- Data protection and replication
- QoS
- High availability with multi-zone replication and self-healing capabilities
- Multi-tenancy support allows multiple users to securely share the same storage infrastructure while maintaining data isolation and performance consistency
Lightbits has also made significant strides in security, with features like API-driven encryption key rotation, and has enhanced its command-line interface with an AI assistant to simplify operations.
Ideal for Modern Workloads and Real-Time Applications
Whether you’re running high-performance databases like Cassandra and MySQL, or powering real-time analytics and AI/ML pipelines, Lightbits delivers the disaggregated storage performance and flexibility you need. Because it performs like local flash but scales like the cloud, Lightbits is the perfect fit for:
- Cloud Service Providers
- Financial services workloads
- eCommerce platforms
- Telecommunications
- AI model training and inferencing
- Virtualization platforms like OpenShift and VMware
Disaggregated Storage that is Flexible and Resilient
To fully leverage modern CPUs and accelerate cloud-native applications, enterprises need to remove the storage bottlenecks created by legacy architectures. Lightbits delivers a powerful disaggregated storage platform that empowers organizations to scale efficiently, reduce costs, and deliver consistent performance at cloud scale. If you’re ready to evolve past the limitations of local SSDs, SANs, or rigid hyperconverged systems, it’s time to explore disaggregated storage with Lightbits.
Lightbits’ disaggregated storage platform integrates seamlessly with a variety of orchestration environments, including Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack, and more, and supports containerized, virtualized, and bare-metal deployments. This flexibility allows for better resource utilization, as it eliminates the waste associated with overprovisioned storage in legacy consolidated environments. Ultimately, the Lightbits solution provides a path to operational efficiency and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by maximizing flash utilization, improving endurance, and delivering the agility and performance of hyperscale cloud infrastructure to on-premises data centers.
