Out of Stealth Mode: Lightbits Labs Announced NVMe/TCP Products

12 March, 2019

With $50 million in funding, Lightbits is pushing the NVMe revolution with the new NVMe/TCP standard to provide private clouds and data centers the performance of local SSDs over standard networks

Lightbits Labs from Kfar-saba, Israel, ended today its stealth mode operation and announced the World’s first products for hyperscale datacenters, based on the new NVMe/TCP standard: The LightOS software and LightField storage acceleration card. TCP is a new transport added to the family of existing NVMe transports that includes PCIe, RDMA, and FC. It offers optional enhancements such as inline data integrity (DIGEST) and online Transport Layer Security (TLS), to gain lower latency while the large-scale data centers still utulizing their existing ubiquitous Ethernet infrastructure with multi-layered switch topologies and traditional Ethernet network adapters.

“Data center storage underutilization has reached epidemic and expensive levels,” said Eran Kirzner, Lightbits Labs CEO and Co-Founder. “By unlocking the full value of NVMe, we’ve changed the playing field for private clouds. Our customers – private cloud and SaaS providers – can now capitalize on the best of both worlds: the application performance of using local NVMe SSD with the simplicity and efficiency of hyperscale.”

The company said that converged infrastructure deployments with direct-attached solid state drives (SSDs) have constrained ratios of storage to compute, leading to underutilized resources. The new standard is set to solve those issues. The idea had attracted powerful players: Since its was founded in 2016, Lightbits Labs has raised approximately $50 million in funding, with investments from marquee strategic investors including DellEMC, Cisco and Micron, and its co-founder and chairman Avigdor Willenz.

Lightbits LightOS is a software-defined storage solution easily integrates into existing data center infrastructure, and runs on off-the-shelf servers (Intel, AMD, or ARM based) with standard NVMe SSDs. It Enhances endurance of the SSDs while delivering more consistent latencies than direct-attached SSDs. The LightField is a PCIe storage acceleration card (photo above) that speeds LightOS’s NVMe/TCP target and GFTL. It provides 200Gb/s line rate compression/decompression, offloading SSD garbage collection management and accelerate NVMe/TCP.

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