Lightbits was founded on the vision to democratize simple, efficient, and agile cloud-scale storage for users. We wanted to bring the architecture of the hyperscalers to enterprise users of all sizes, with commodity hardware and flash storage. To make that happen, we invented NVMe/TCP to simplify and accelerate storage for cloud-native applications at scale. A few months ago we introduced Lightbits on AWS for preview, and now we are proud to say that it’s ready for production deployments.
While there are certainly many storage solutions available on AWS today, IT organizations are finding that they don’t wholly solve their storage challenges and, in fact, introduce some new challenges and tradeoffs. Organizations already using the public cloud have come to a few realizations:
- High performance comes at a high price
- Each cloud provider has a unique storage interface that is not portable, which leads to vendor lock-in
- Data services are minimal and add significant cost and overhead to manage
With the launch of Lightbits on AWS, we solve these challenges for IT organizations that are dissatisfied with what they are paying for storage on AWS or aren’t happy with the price/performance scenario. They need an alternative solution that will provide premium performance at a lower cost. Enter: Lightbits Cloud Platform on AWS.
Our superior public cloud storage solution delivers on the true promise of the cloud–efficiency, simplicity, agility, and flexibility. With Lightbits on AWS, users can enjoy the enterprise-level features that on-premises Lightbits users have come to value—whereas, in existing block storage solutions for the public cloud, these same features come with an extra cost or are not available. Switching to Lightbits helps future-proof your cloud storage on AWS with higher performance and enterprise features at a lower operating cost.
By utilizing Intel-based storage-optimized EC2 instances with local NVMe SSDs, we can disaggregate storage and compute through a software-defined solution. The combination of Lightbits software, accelerated by Intel technology, delivers an unmatched combination of performance, resiliency, and scalability while lowering TCO. Users can experience the same performance and economics in the cloud as they enjoy with on-premises storage.
If you’re considering using or already using AWS cloud services, Lightbits on AWS is the solution to help you get better performance at a lower cost. The enterprise feature set enables scalable provisioning, so you only pay for the storage you use.
Lightbits on AWS is built on three principles:
- Simplicity: Lightbits storage cluster service is fully equipped with enterprise-ready data services that are easy to manage, such as thin provisioning, compression, auto-scaling and auto-healing. It’s compatible with any AWS storage instance and any client instance. You can provision a storage cluster and start allocating data volumes on Intel® Xeon®-based storage-optimized EC2 instances in minutes.
- Efficiency: Efficiency is rooted in Lightbits’ ability to provide high-performance block storage on the cloud. Lightbits delivers a lower total cost of ownership and a larger return on investment with built-in enterprise data services and high-performance. Auto-scaling and per-volume replication policies mean Lightbits is up to 50% less expensive than other public cloud block storage solutions.
- Agility: Dynamically adjust storage to meet immediate needs. Only pay for the storage that is used and effectively spend less time on management and remediation activities. The API-driven architecture supports free snapshots and restores, which means any data lost can be restored quickly and cost-effectively.
Lightbits on AWS Use Cases
Lightbits can be deployed on any cloud. It supports a range of platforms, including VMWare, Kubernetes and OpenStack and virtualized or containerized applications.
Prime Application Uses:
- Analytics
- Business Intelligence
- Database/Warehouse
- IoT
- Machine Learning
- Search
- Transactional workloads
Lightbits on AWS was built for IOPS-intensive use cases like Oracle, mySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Postgres, and many others. Users only pay for usage through auto-sizing rather than paying for provisioned capacity.
Oracle Use Case
Oracle Database workloads are typically IOPS intensive, and Lightbits on AWS offers blazing fast speeds and a dramatically lower cost that will boost performance and reduce the total cost of operations. With Lightbits, you can reduce the number of Oracle instances required for a given amount of data, with speeds up to 6x faster.
Why Choose Lightbits on AWS
Lightbits is the best fit for AWS users looking for cloud block storage with built-in enterprise features, ease of use, cost efficiency, and high performance. The enterprise-level features surpass those available with competitor solutions and the software-defined, API-driven architecture delivers services such as replication, clones and snapshots, and data reduction without additional fees.
With Lightbits, AWS users can experience up to 6x faster performance at half the cost than a comparable cluster on other block storage solutions. Users pay per Lightbits cluster with unlimited IOPS rather than provisions IOPS and capacity.
Getting Started
We know that ease of use is a critical factor in managing storage in the cloud. Setting up a cluster on Lightbits is easy—it takes just a few clicks on the AWS Marketplace and takes about 15 minutes for the storage cluster to be ready in your Virtual Private Cloud.
Whether your enterprise is an established AWS user or undergoing a new migration, Lightbits offers storage cost optimization and performance enhancements.
Get your free trial and proof of concept to ensure Lightbits is the right option for your AWS strategy.
Want to learn more? Explore our Lightbits on AWS resources, including this video and blog post. Or register for a demo.
