Availability of Lightbits in Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Lightbits Labs, Inc. announced the availability of its Cloud Data Platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure.

The company’s customers can now take advantage of the productive Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.

The firm eliminates the performance and cost limitations associated with native cloud storage, enabling enterprises to migrate their storage-intensive workloads to Azure. By clustering VMs connected by NVMe over TCP, it creates a performance SAN in the cloud to power demanding database, analytics, and transactional workloads on Azure while also providing essential enterprise data services. Lightbits is available through the Marketplace as a ‘Managed Application’, making it as easy to provision and manage as the native storage offerings.

In preview in EU-West, US-East, and US-West Azure regions, Lightbits enables customers to:

Accelerate migration to cloud. It is capable of delivering up to 1 million IOs/volume and consistent latency of 190ms. This high-performance scales linearly as the company’s cluster size increases.
Control cloud storage costs. Organizations can save up to 85% on their storage costs. Customers are charged on a capacity consumption basis, not provisioned IO/s or volumes, with capacity usage minimized through thin provisioning, data reduction, and other efficiencies.
Remain hands-off from managing storage. The firms purchases from Azure Marketplace include support services for managing the storage cluster within the customer’s Azure subscription. Managed application services include 24/7 health monitoring, HA with SLAs, proactive software upgrades, critical vulnerability patches, auto-healing notifications, and guidelines for cluster expansion.
Scale services flexibly. Company’s disaggregated architecture enables the cluster to scale capacity and performance independently. QoS ensures users don’t experience any service impact as workloads are added to the Lightbits cluster.
Simplify provisioning and volume management. With its resources are provisioned and managed like a SAN in the cloud instead of on a volume-by-volume basis, preventing overprovisioning of direct attached cloud storage.
Maintain high availability across availability zones. Data is protected using synchronous replication within or across availability zones (AZs) and self-healing capabilities ensure business continuity.
Be agile with ‘any cloud’ flexibility. The company licenses are portable between public clouds on Azure and private clouds at on-premises data centers. The multi-tenant environment services multiple heterogeneous app environments.

“As organizations prioritize cloud-first strategies, many are discovering they have mission-critical workloads that won’t be able to meet SLAs running in the public cloud, or that it comes with costs that make it infeasible,” said Kam Eshghi, co-founder and CSO, Lightbits. “With Lightbits they get the highest performance possible on Azure at a lower cost than native cloud storage, plus hands-off operations as a managed service. Now they can migrate all their workloads to the cloud and be confident that they won’t have to repatriate them back on-premises due to skyrocketing costs.”

“Through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers around the world can easily find, buy, and deploy partner solutions they can trust, all certified and optimized to run on Azure,” said Jake Zborowski, GM, Microsoft Azure platform, Microsoft Corp.“We’re happy to welcome the Lightbits solution to the growing Azure Marketplace ecosystem.”

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. It helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

“The market needed a cloud data platform like Lightbits that removes the bottlenecks associated with cloud-native storage and enables the migration of critical, storage-intensive workloads to Azure,” said John Barnes, sales director, Sycomp. “Our customers running high-speed databases and AI workloads needed a solution on Azure that delivered the best price/performance capabilities while also being simple to deploy and manage. Today that unmatched solution is Lightbits.”