By Alfred Chase Hui, Regional Sales Director, Asia

Supporting private clouds and cloud-native applications with cost effective and scalable solutions is one of our priorities here at Lightbits, so we are excited to announce our partnership with China’s ZStack, also known as Shanghai Yunzhou Information and Technology Ltd. To kick off the partnership, ZStack has certified LightOS for deployment in ZStack Cloud Platform environments.

ZStack is the private cloud solution arm of Alibaba Cloud, which together makes this news an important milestone for Lightbits and ZStack to bring much enhanced private cloud and storage solutions into the China market. ZStack is a light-weight Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) hybrid cloud solution which can be easily deployed to manage compute hardware in data centers, servers on the edge, and hybrid cloud environments across on-premises and Alibaba Cloud resources while also providing server, network, and storage virtualization (HCl solution) all in one product.

The strategic partnership means we can now deliver our composable, disaggregated NVMe/TCP-based LightOS storage solution to address data intensive workloads in ZStack Cloud. LightOS resides on the NVMe storage nodes and works in the background to accelerate applications (Figure 1). Both companies support cloud-native applications with scalable and cost-effective solutions, so the synergies are highly beneficial for our joint customers in disciplines such as finance and banking, the IoT, healthcare, higher education and research, and manufacturing.

ZStack has a technical collaboration with Intel to create enterprise-ready IaaS infrastructure solutions; ZStack is also an Intel Cloud Service Provider (CSP) customer in China. The technical collaboration with Intel means ZStack can focus on building deployable, maintainable, and flexible IaaS software, helping enterprises move IT infrastructure into the cloud era. And with Intel’s new Ice Lake processors enabling our LightOS storage to increase per-server performance by as much as 60%, while also increasing storage density as much as six times over previous Intel processor generations, our partnership with zStack could not be more timely.

I recently spoke with Frank Zhang, Founder CEO at ZStack, who said he is eager to get his customers using LightOS. “We are delighted to cooperate with Lightbits, as the creator of the NVMe/TCP standard, and the pioneer of corresponding products. Lightbits provides users with a high-performance, easy-to- maintain, and low-cost storage solution based on the data center Ethernet-TCP network. This protocol provides great flexibility and is suitable for bare metal, containers, databases and other scenarios. I trust this partnership will be fruitful, and in the near future will carry out more in-depth cooperation in different areas to provide joint customers with more complete private cloud and hybrid cloud solutions.”

Figure 1: Illustrates how ZStack Cloud Management Stack can orchestrate not only ZStack private cloud resources, but also the customer’s existing VMWare base resources and public cloud (Alibaba cloud) resources.

Our partnership lets us deliver high performance NVMe/TCP storage to customers using ZStack Cloud native environments so they can independently scale storage from compute. The disaggregated, composable Lightbits LightOS™ high-performance software based on NVMe/TCP storage will result in lower latencies and higher throughput. In addition, the disaggregated architecture of LightOS supports QLC for better flash utilization, which results in a lower TCO and higher performing systems–which couldn’t be supported before on iSCSI. Now, our joint customers can achieve the benefits of hyperscale computing–without complexity and high cost.

Eran Kirzner, CEO at Lightbits added, “At Lightbits, we believe our customers will be happy to know large-scale cloud services, PaaS and SaaS can be supported by our partnership with ZStack Cloud, and that the private & hybrid clouds are simple to deploy and easy to maintain. The combined solution maximizes resource utilization, so customers maintain operational efficiency while also easily scaling their infrastructure as their business demands change.”

ZStack was founded in 2015 and quickly grew to be a leading Chinese private cloud platform solution provider specializing in the research and development of cloud computing software and hardware. The company is headquartered in Shanghai and has deployed its private cloud products for more than 1300 enterprises customers in 30 nations around the globe, including financial services organizations, Internet companies and government agencies.