Lightbits and Crusoe Collaborate

Lightbits Labs Ltd announced that Crusoe Energy Systems LLC, a vertically-integrated AI infrastructure company, has expanded its AI cloud service with its software-defined block storage.

The collaboration between the 2 companies provides expanded access to block storage solutions for customers with AI workloads at scale.

Crusoe is powering its data centers with a combination of wasted, stranded, and clean energy resources to lower the cost and environmental impact of AI cloud computing. The Crusoe AI data center is constructed to standards, advancing the frontier of data center design and scale for AI training and inference workloads.

“Lightbits’ comprehensive suite of enterprise-grade functionality has been instrumental in helping us build a high-performance, climate-aligned AI cloud platform, addressing performance and operational gaps that other block storage solutions struggle with,” said Patrick McGregor, CPO, Crusoe. “From data preprocessing to real-time inference, the advantages of lower and more consistent latency, higher throughput, and linear scalability make Lightbits’ high-performance block storage an excellent offering for Crusoe Cloud’s customers to optimize their AI workflows. The Lightbits team continues to be a great partner, providing continual improvements in product usability and high-quality, hands-on support for our team.“

Lightbits leverages NVMe/TCP to enable direct access to NVMe storage over standard Ethernet TCP/IP networks. This architecture reduces latency and maximizes throughput, making it for demanding AI and ML workloads. Lightbits delivers up to 4x higher performance compared to other vendors and open-source solutions like Ceph, particularly notable for smaller IO sizes. Additionally, Lightbits scales IO/s with increased load while consistently maintaining latencies under 500μs. The clustered architecture provides up to 3 replicas per volume across multiple availability zones for HA.

Lightbits delivers a combination of scalability, performance, and cost efficiency. The flexibility delivered by Lightbits’ software-defined and API architecture cannot be understated: allowing Crusoe’s Cloud users to choose the most optimized environment for their production workloads. Users can resize their VMs and consume storage in the form of persistent disks on demand while leveraging the OS images pipeline to generate their workload-specific images, e.g., LLM training with Jax or GenAI with Stable Diffusion.

Additionally, Lightbits’ solution is integrated with Kubernetes, OpenStack, and VMware to support modern cloud-native apps and traditional virtualized apps.

“Our collaboration with Crusoe has reached new heights, underscoring Lightbits’ commitment to providing cloud infrastructure optimized for AI workloads,” said Kam Eshghi, co-founder and CSO, Lightbits. “The expanded partnership reflects the tangible results Crusoe has seen and demonstrates our crucial role in shaping the future of AI cloud technology.“

This expansion with Lightbits enables Crusoe Cloud to continue to provide performance and scalability to meet the needs of AI and ML, scientific computing, and graphics customers from now and into the future.

Additional resources:
How Crusoe built an AI Cloud service with Lightbits’ SDS     
How Crusoe Built an AI Cloud Service for Scale     
Crusoe Builds a Climate-aligned AI Cloud With Power for the Future