Lightbits V.3.5.1 Release: Monitored Faster Without Interruption

By Muli Ben-Yehuda, chief scientist and co-founder, Lightbits Labs Ltd.

It is the latest release of the company’s complete data platform for any cloud, introducing the following features and capabilities.

Just last month, the company announced Lightbits on Microsoft Azure, accessible through the marketplace as an Azure Managed Application. This release incorporates enhancements to the monitoring and troubleshooting abilities of Lightbits on Azure, including the integration of new events and alerts, such as cluster capacity limit alerts, now visible in Azure Application Insights.

For any storage system, the ability to handle abrupt shutdowns is crucial. An abrupt shutdown – as opposed to an orderly or graceful shutdown – is what happens when you pull the plug on a server, or your cloud provider loses power to a data center. In Lightbits v3.5.1, the recovery time for a Lightbits server following an abrupt shutdown has been significantly accelerated, now up to 3.5x faster compared to previous releases.

Lightbits exposes data through NVMe/TCP namespaces, which we commonly refer to as ‘volumes.’ When a compute server (also known as a host, initiator, or client) attempts to read from or write to a volume exposed by the Lightbits cluster through NVMe/TCP, the Lightbits server verifies that the compute server is authorized to do so. These checks for volume access authorization along the data path are now faster than before, saving precious cycles. When an operation is performed millions of times per second, every cycle counts.

Lightbits servers handle substantial data movement. When data is sent or received via the network, NICs trigger interrupts (also known as IRQs or interrupt requests) to signal the software to handle the incoming data or complete the transmission of outgoing data. The cumulative impact of these interrupts on system performance often depends on what exactly it is that they are interrupting. The v3.5.1 introduces a new system service, the Lightbits interrupt balancer, responsible for assigning different interrupts to the appropriate CPU cores based on changing system conditions. Better interrupt balancing can result in a performance increase of over 50% for specific workloads.

Lastly, Lightbits v3.5.1 incorporates several bug fixes and smaller enhancements as requested by our users. For a list, please refer to the release notes.

Resources:
Lightbits on Microsoft Azure Marketplace
5.1 Software Release video
Lightbits on Azure overview (video)
Lightbits Risk-Free Cloud Quickstart Kit