Lightbits Labs Celebrates NVM Express Ratification of NVMe/TCP Transport Standard

With NVM Express, Inc.‘ recent ratification of TCP/IP as an approved transport layer for nonvolatile memory express (NVMe), Lightbits Labs announced that its hyperscale storage platform is the first to take advantage of the minted transport standard.

Lightbits Labs platform
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As a storage pioneer in NVMe/TCP, the company helped drive the standardization effort and worked closely with NVM Express and its member companies, including taking a leadership role in the initial development of the standard specifications. Designed to layer over existing software-based TCP transport implementations as well as future hardware accelerated implementations, NVMe/TCP lets large-scale data centers utilize their existing, ubiquitous TCP/IP infrastructure to realize NVMe’s performance benefits.

Cloud service providers and enterprises with webscale infrastructures are turning to NVMe to meet the storage demands of data-intensive workloads. As designers make NVMe their preferred solution for fast storage, the NVMe market is forecast to grow to $60 billion by 2021 (G2M Research), and that will only increase with the ratification of the NVMe/TCP protocol. The transport enables storage access between servers interconnected by any standard TCP/IP network with excellent performance and latency characteristics.

“Using NVMe/TCP, Lightbits Labs has pioneered an approach that separates storage and compute without touching the network infrastructure or data center clients,” said Eran Kirzner, co-founder and CEO, Lightbits Labs. “Our industry-first hyperscale NVMe/TCP storage solution is purpose-built for the cloud and leverages today’s data center infrastructure, allowing IT organizations to smoothly transition to a low-latency, shared storage modelwithout sacrificing performance.“

The company also announced that it participated in the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) Plugfest at The University of New Hampshire‘s InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), the compliance certification lab for NVMe technology. Held on November 12-15, 2018, in Durham, New Hampshire, the PlugFest brought together vendors to test against NVMe standards. As the only NVMe/TCP storage solution vendor at this event, the firm showcased interoperability with multiple NIC vendors and demonstrated NVMe/TCP’s ease of deployment.

“Lightbits has been leading the charge towards standardization and adoption of NVMe/TCP, bringing much-needed ubiquity to the NVMe over Fabrics ecosystem,” said Peter Onufryk, board member, NVM Express. “Although new standards and protocols often take years to mature and gain adoption, I expect to see NVMe/TCP adoption to be faster than any previous storage protocol.“

The firm’ platform is a solution to deliver the benefits of NVMe/TCP including:

• Providing comparable performance and latency to direct attached SSDs

• Enabling disaggregation across a data center’s availability zones and regions

• Leveraging ubiquitous TCP transport with low latency, highly parallel NVMe stack

• No changes required to the networking infrastructure or to clients

• An efficient and streamlined block storage software stack optimized for NVMe

• Providing parallel access to storage optimized for today’s multi-core application/client servers

NVM Express is a consortium of more than 100 companies advocating for non-volatile memory in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center. The NVMe/TCP Transport Binding specification was ratified on November 15, 2018, and is officially part of NVM Express’ NVMe-oF family of transports.

NVMe/TCP extends the NVMe-oF offering for existing data centers that already include a TCP/IP infrastructure.

Resources:
Video: Details about this technology and Lightbits’ storage platform
Information about NVMe/TCP: NVMe/TCP Transport Binding specification