FMS: Lightbits Labs Demonstrated Hyperscale Storage Platform for NVMe OverTCP

Lightbits Labs exhibited and demonstrated an hyperscale storage platforms for NVMe over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) at Flash Memory Summit.

Click to enlarge

The company has also published a white paper that outlines the benefits of NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) for data centers.

NVMe has transformed the storage industry since its emergence as the state-of-the-art protocol for high-performance SSDs. Initially designed for high-performance direct-attached PCIe SSDs, NVMe was later expanded with NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) to support a rack-scale remote pool of SSDs. The IT industry has widely accepted that this NVMe-oF model will replace the iSCSI protocol as the communication standard between compute servers and storage servers and become the default protocol for disaggregated storage.

Click to enlarge

The initial definition of NVMe-oF included support for two transport layers: FC and remote direct memory access (RDMA) fabrics.

NVMe/TCP extends the NVMe-oF offering for existing data centers that already include a TCP/IP infrastructure, offering the following benefits:

Providing comparable performance and latency to Direct Attached SSDs (DAS)
Enabling disaggregation across a data center’s availability zones and reions
Leveraging ubiquitous TCP transport with low latency, highly parallel NVMe stack
No changes required to the networking infrastructure or to application servers
Efficient and streamlined block storage software stack optimized for NVMe
Providing parallel access to storage optimized for today’s multi-core application/client servers
Standard-based solution that will have industry-wide support

The company is working with industry leaders within NVM Express, Inc. to extend the NVMe-oF standard to support TCP/IP transport. The 1.1 revision of NVMe over Fabrics, targeted for release by end of this year, includes the TCP/IP transport layer as one of its marquee features.

“As data centers move from direct-attached SSDs to disaggregated storage architectures, it is important to minimize disruption in implementation,” said Eran Kirzner, founder and CEO, Lightbits Labs. “Built with NVMe/TCP technology as the backbone, Lightbits’ solution offers estimated savings and performance advantages that include reduced tail latency by up to 50% versus DAS and a doubling of SSD capacity utilization. We’re excited to demonstrate Lightbits’ capabilities to attendees at the Flash Memory Summit.“

“The NVM Express organization is pleased to add TCP/IP as a supported transport for NVMe over Fabrics,” said Amber Huffman, president, NVM Express, Inc. “Lightbits’ solution demonstrates a key benefit of NVMe/TCP, enabling the use of NVMe-oF in existing data centers without requiring changes to the network infrastructure and with great performance.“

About Lightbits Labs
Lightbits Labs was purpose-built for cloud infrastructure. Its technology separates compute and storage and allows them to scale independently. The company’ team includes key contributors to the NVMe standard and some of the originators of NVMe over Fabric. Lightbits Labs leads the crafting of the NVMe/TCP standard.