VMworld: Lightbits Labs Demonstrated How LightOS Solution Working With VMware vSAN

At VMworld 2019, Lightbits Labs demonstrated how its LightOS solution working with VMware vSAN can independently scale storage and compute to maximize efficiency and flexibility.

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The demo cases in which vSAN customers benefit from disaggregation and how a VMware and the firm’s solution improves their infrastructure utilization.

Companies whose storage needs are growing faster than their compute needs, who see the limitations of expanding their storage through available drive slots on the host, and who feel restricted by being unable to use storage from ‘outside’ their existing storage cluster, should join the demonstration and see how Lightbits solutions can address their challenges.

VMware vSAN powers VMware’s HCI solutions and pools DAS devices across a vSphere cluster to create a distributed, shared data store. Storage and compute are scaled in lockstep within vSAN. When combined with LightOS software, vSAN users can disaggregate their HCI and can scale storage and compute independently, with no change to the vSAN management or user experience.

By working with LightOS, vSAN users gain the benefit of NVMe-oF disaggregation, allowing for heterogeneous clustering of vSAN nodes with local drives or diskless hosts. It also lets vSAN users NVMe performance, enhanced SSD endurance, and other benefits such as thin provisioning, wirespeed compression, and erasure coding for fault tolerance.

“Adding hosts to grow storage is expensive and inefficient, and typically strands unused capacity in the storage cluster,” said Kam Eshghi, VP, strategy and business development, Lightbits. “NVMe/TCP, pioneered by the Lightbits team, extends NVMe across the data center using standard networks, connecting remote NVMe SSDs to hosts with latencies that are indistinguishable from local storage.”

“VMware constantly works with cutting edge technology providers to enhance and extend the value of VMware solutions,” said Vijay Ramachandran, VP, product management, HCI business unit, VMware, Inc. “Lightbits delivers an innovative software solution that optimizes storage performance and endurance with a global FTL layer. The technology holds great promise for customers looking to extend hyperconverged infrastructure to environments that are served by traditional storage products today.“

In other news at the show, the company rolled out improved hardware acceleration capabilities with the second generation of its LightField storage acceleration card. This iteration of LightField features improvements in performance and power efficiency, cost as well as smaller, half-height, half-length (HHHL) PCIe add-in card form factor. The reduced size allows for integration into a broader set of commodity storage servers, including 1U high density storage servers.

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March 13, 2019 | Press Release