Lightbits Labs democratizes storage with disaggregated architecture

Lightbits Labs, emerging leader in NVMe/TCP, confirms its rapid market adoption during a very interesting IT Press Tour session. Due to Covid-19, this session was organized online with Lightbits Labs people in Tel-Aviv and in US.

We had the privilege to have Avigdor Willenz, chairman of the board, to share his entrepreneur experience and market vision having been a catalyzer of some famous technologies, companies and exists. Among them we can list Habana Labs sold to Intel for $2B a few months ago, Leaba Semiconductor acquired by Cisco in 2016, before Anapurna Labs swallowed by AWS for $270M in 2015 and of course Galileo Technology sold to Marvell in 2000 for $2.7B. Wow, what a track record and impressive "savoir-faire". In addition to Avigdor, we notice that Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Cadence and chairman of Walden International, and Marius Nacht, co-founder and chairman of Check Point Software, belong to the board of Lightbits Labs as well. We also realize that Cisco Investments, Micron and Dell Capital have significantly invested in the company. Thus, immediately, we know what will be the future of Lightbits Labs as Avigdor and others always participate to technology disruption wave bringing to the market potential worldwide technology leader. It will be just a question of time and money, but the transaction will be huge, believe me, probably in the next 18 months as many gorillas wish to jump into this large coming market.

I already wrote a few times about Lightbits Labs (May 2017, Aug. 2018, Mar. 2019, Apr. 2019 & Aug. 2019) but this refresh was a good one with discussion on last news around clustering and 2019 outcomes during a very interactive session.

The company reaffirms its SDS play, the strategic aspect of TCP and its key differentiators with a global Flash Translation Layer aka Global FTL or even GFTL.

Lightbits promotes three products:

• LightOS, a real SDS model that transforms a linux server into storage target server connected to hosts via TCP network over Ethernet. LightOS implements NVMe/TCP linked to hosts' standard Linux NVMe drive.
• LightField is an PCIe acceleration card that offloads server CPUs for erasure coding and data reduction.
• SuperSSD is a 24 NVMe SSDs array with 2 10Gbps ethernet ports. We're still wondering why the company builds this except to prove the capability of their software and stay independent. With oem or reseller agreements, partners will pick LightOS + LightField on their hardware like Dell or Inspur (see below).

LightOS has introduced with v2.0 last December a cluster mode with several interesting additional features like multi-pathing and replication. In terms of data protection, the GFTL uses an N+1 erasure coding (EC) working at the pool level and plan N+2 in Q4/2020. With a 24 drives and N+1 it means 2 similar pools of 11 partitions + 1 parity partition, 3 pools of 7 + 1 parity, 4 pools of 5 + 1 parity and with N+2 the model could be 2 similar pools of 10 partitions + 2 parities, 6 +2 or 4+2.

From a pool, you declare volumes that span all drives with the pool. EC as a striping method works only within an array today and with v3 in Q4/2020 the striping will be across arrays. Today you need LVM software to build large volume that span arrays in concat, mirror or striping mode. Volumes are dynamic and can be thin-provisioned with 4kB block. Multi-pathing works across arrays and support primary optimized path and not optimized path. We expect more rule in the future. At low level, write operations use large sequential chunks.

Dell and Inspur are two key partners, for Dell it is associated with R740xd well described here.

This disaggregated model reminds us old days of SAN where the argument to share external storage was king. With scale-out model, HCI and finally DAS based servers coupling, this shared external storage seems to be less important but Lightbits has demonstrated the opposite at VMworld US 2019. Here are the photo I took there on Micron booth that illustrates how to extend HCI product with a Lightbits storage. Lightbits makes a lot of sense for disaggregated HCI.

As Avigdor stated in his intro, the three key elements of Lightbits Labs are 1/ software-defined, 2/ its Global FTL and 3/ NVMe over TCP, a standard highly deployed on the market... all ingredients of the coming success. 2020 will be a key year for Lightbits Labs, we'll monitor them carefully.