Intel Capital Invests Into Lightbits Labs

Intel Corp. and Lightbits Labs, Ltd announced an agreement to propel development of disaggregated storage solutions to solve the challenges of data center operators who are craving improved TCO due to stranded disk capacity and performance.

This strategic partnership includes technical co-engineering, go-to-market collaboration and an Intel Capital investment in Lightbits Labs.

Lightbits’ LightOS product delivers performance shared storage across servers while providing high availability and read-and-write management designed to maximize the value of flash-based storage.While being optimized for Intel hardware, it provides customers with improved storage efficiency and reduces under utilization while maintaining compatibility with existing infrastructure without compromising performance and simplicity.

Lightbits Labs has demonstrated LightOS NVMe-oF/TCP storage
with remote direct memory access-class performance
when accelerated with the Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapter with ADQ technology.

The firm will enhance its composable disaggregated SDS solution, LightOS, for Intel technologies, creating an optimized software and hardware solution. The system will utilize Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel 3D NAND SSDs based on Intel QLC Technology, Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI acceleration capabilities and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters with Application Device Queues (ADQ) technology. Intel FPGAs for next-generation performance, flexibility and programmability will complement the solution.

In addition to the technical collaboration between the 2 companies, thay are collaborating to provide solutions to customers and develop the ecosystem to drive broad adoption of these innovations. As a first example of the potential performance benefit this collaboration offers, Lightbits Labs demonstrated LightOS NVMe-oF/TCP storage with RDMA-class performance when accelerated with the Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapter with ADQ technology.

ADQ enables NVMe-oF/TCP to achieve distributed storage performance in the same range as RDMA-based protocols, while NVMe-oF/TCP enables broad adoption because of its ease of deployment and scalability. Results show an up to 30% improvement in response time predictability as measured by P99.99 tail latency, up to 50% reduction in average latency and up to 70% throughput increase as measured in IOPS when using ADQ vs. without ADQ. (1) This integrated solution from the 2 vendors delivers persistent storage for cloud native applications with improved price-performance, ease-of-implementation, availability and scalability.

“Intel is an industry leader with deep expertise in data center technologies, cutting-edge products, global sales prowess and an impressive ecosystem,” said Eran Kirzner, Lightbits Labs CEO and co-founder. “We are excited to partner with Intel Corporation, and our joint solutions will set the bar for generating new ROI metrics for enterprise and cloud customers.”

Remi EL-Ouazzane, VP and data platforms group chief strategy and business development officer, Intel, said: ‘The data center is being transformed, with disaggregation and composability of resources being essential to meet the efficiency requirements needed to address the explosion of data. Our differentiated hardware capabilities coupled with Lightbits innovative NVMe-oF software gives our joint customers an exceptional economic solution to address this strategic inflection point.”

(1) Performance claims made by Lightbits Labs based on their internal testing in July 2020 (for further information). For more information about Intel performance and benchmark results

Read also:
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