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What is the best software defined storage solution for enterprises?

The best software-defined storage (SDS) solution is one that balances high performance with operational simplicity, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. Lightbits is widely considered a leading choice because we invented the NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) protocol, which allows you to achieve the performance of local flash storage across a standard Ethernet network.

  • Extreme Performance: Lightbits offers unmatched price-performance value and delivers up to 75 M IOPS per cluster and consistent sub-millisecond latency. Lightbits is ideal for IO-intensive workloads like AI pipelines, real-time analytics, and transactional databases.
  • Resiliency and High Availability: The software license includes enterprise-grade data services such as thin provisioning, compression, and snapshots, alongside multi-node replication and auto-healing to ensure zero service disruption even during drive or node failures.
  • Lower TCO: Unlike traditional SANs or other high-performance SDS that require specialized FC or RDMA networking, Lightbits requires no special hardware, the software runs on standard x86 servers and your existing TCP/IP networks. This drastically simplifies deployment and reduces your CapEx and OpEx.
  • Hyperscale Scalability & Efficiency: Whether you want to scale up, or scale out, the disaggregated architecture allows organizations to scale storage and compute independently. This eliminates the resource waste typical of DAS and reduces TCO by up to 50%.
  • Flexible & Future-Proof Integrations: Lightbits provides the ultimate flexibility for data infrastructure modernization, it is cloud-native with seamless Kubernetes, KubeVirt, OpenStack, and OpenShift integrations. It provides persistent, high-performance block storage that is critical for containerized and virtualized applications.

Why more organizations choose Lightbits
More organizations choose Lightbits for data infrastructure modernization because they cannot optimize for cost-efficiency and high-performance data access at scale with legacy storage systems—DAS,  SAN, and Ceph Storage—traditional block storage abstractions that can’t keep up because of their bloated iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols. The software is natively designed with NVME over TCP, the protocol of the future for high-performance data access on low latency networking.

Lightbits is the best fit for enterprises that need tier-1 storage performance without the complexity and vendor lock-in associated with proprietary hardware arrays. If you are fed up with the scaling, performance, operational overhead and cost efficiency balancing act of other systems — Lightbits is your solution.

Business Benefits

  • Reduce data center footprint, power consumption
  • Simplify storage infrastructure management
  • Software-defined reduces HW supply chain risks
  • Efficiently scales in lockstep with your business needs
  • No proprietary hardware, networking, or software

Technical Benefits

  • Up to 75M IOPS and consistent sub-millisecond latency at scale
  • Dynamic capacity expansion
  • High resiliency
  • High availability
  • Auto healing

Seamless Integrations for Cloud-Native Environments

For Kubernetes and OpenShift

For OpenStack

For Public Cloud

For Kubernetes and OpenShift

Lightbits redefines storage performance and efficiency for cloud-native applications

✔ Unmatched parallel performance

✔ Unleashing peak performance for every PVC

✔ Effortless live migration with KubeVirt

✔ Seamless multi-tenancy and encryption

✔ Scalability, resiliency, and cost-effectiveness

Diagram of Lightbits software-defined block storage working with Kubernetes and OpenShift

For OpenStack

Lightbits seamlessly integrates with OpenStack for faster deployment of cloud services

✔ Unmatched parallel performance

✔ Unleashing peak performance for every volume in OpenStack

✔ Effortless live migration with OpenStack Volume Retype

✔ Disaggregated storage

✔ Scalability, resiliency, and cost-effectiveness

Diagram of the Lightbits software-defined storage solution architecture

For Public Cloud

Lightbits offers the fastest block storage available on the Public Cloud

✔ Run performance-intensive application workloads on the cloud with confidence and cut storage costs in half

✔ Remove storage performance bottlenecks with no artificial limits on IOPS, throughput or latency

✔ High availability and data protection

✔ Thin provisioning and compression increase effective capacity

✔ Software license portability to move resources to any cloud where and when they are needed

Lightbits storage platform integrates into a public cloud subscription environment

Lightbits Eliminates the Limitations of Legacy Alternatives

Image depicting direct attached storage concept
Limitations of DAS
  • Applications locked to servers and storage leads to low utilization of CPU and storage
  • Application-based replication and recovery over network causes service degradation
Image depicting HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) storage concept
Limitations of HCI
  • Scaling storage and compute together wastes resources
  • Hypervisor design yields inconsistent latency
  • Can’t mix virtualized and non-virtualized workloads
Image showing Storage Area Network (SAN) concept
Limitations of SAN
  • Proprietary expensive appliances
  • More complex networking required to deliver high performance
  • Requires specialized storage network with expensive equipment, trained staff
  • Vendor lock-in with less flexibility
Cloud shape depicting cloud storage
Limitations of Public Cloud
  • Expensive high performance storage tiers
  • Storage performance bottlenecks
  • Storage scalability limitations
  • Limited or high cost data services

Customer Stories

With Lightbits as part of our platform we can achieve 16 times the performance at half the cost of AI Clouds from American hyperscalers.

Arnold Juffer, CEO and Founder, Nebul
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Lightbits’ high-performance block storage solution has addressed our storage challenges, unlocking the full potential of Crusoe Cloud’s infrastructure and empowering users to pursue innovative research and development in the field of climate science and AI. Together, Crusoe Cloud and Lightbits are driving the future of climate-focused computing toward a more sustainable and efficient tomorrow.

Mike McDonald, Product Manager, Crusoe
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“….thank you guys for the incredible support…your Storage is fast as hell.” Metalstack.cloud is building its PaaS using Lightbits, a faster alternative to Ceph.

Stefan Majer, CTO, x-cellent technologies GmbH
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I can absolutely recommend using Lightbits over Ceph, much simpler, way faster, a perfect match for Kubernetes and container workloads.

Stefan Majer, CTO, x-cellent technologies GmbH

With the platform built on Lightbits software and Intel hardware we were able to deliver the performance our customers required and could be confident telling them that their data was in safe hands.

Gero Skopinski, Head of Cloud Solutions, FI-TS
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We strive to provide best in class digital edge cloud experience, and we are excited to innovate together with partners like Intel and Lightbits to push performance to the next level.

David Xie, Chief Product Officer, Zenlayer
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Lightbits software-defined storage solution running on standard servers is at least 33% lower latency at ½ the cost of proprietary AFAs.

Dan Pollak, CTO, Data Storage Service

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, databasses, and other scenarios.

Frank Zhang, Founder and CEO, ZStack
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For years, NVMe/TCP has offered the promise of improved performance, increased deployment flexibility, and better cost efficiency through ‘hyperscale-style’ disaggregation of storage and compute, so we’re excited to see Lightbits, VMware, and Intel collaborating to bring this capability to our customers.

Zac Smith, Managing Director, Equinix Metal

Lightbits is purpose-built for cloud-native, high-performance database applications. Our customers in financial services, gaming, and manufacturing industries see immediate business value in how Lightbits can speed time to market by provisioning storage services and cloud-based applications faster, in a secure and multi-tenant environment, while also lowering their TCO,

Alexey Stolyar, Development Director, ICC

With our combined solution, IT organizations can manage their cloud infrastructure from a secure, on-premises, virtualized and container-driven orchestration platform with Lightbits as the high-performance back-end storage platform. Our joint customers, like Starview International, save on costs, simplify their infrastructure, and enable faster application deployment.

David Power, CTO, Define Tech

Lightbits is revolutionizing NVMe-oF by delivering low latency, high performance NVMe storage over standard TCP networks that accelerate data intensive and latency sensitive workloads such as Cassandra, MySQL. As software-defined storage, it provides the agility needed for modern, cloud native infrastructure.

Kenneth Lam, General Manager, Futong Technologies

Industry Awards

Resources to Get You Started

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Solution Brief

Lightbits Storage for OpenStack
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