Lightbits brings high-performance block storage to Oracle cloud

The Lightbits cloud virtual SAN software has been ported to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), where it delivers fast, low-latency block storage. 

Lightbits block storage software has, until now, run in the AWS and Azure clouds, using ephemeral storage instances for faster than standard cloud block storage that also cost less. It creates a linearly scalable virtual SAN by clustering virtual machines via NVMe over TCP, and can deliver up to 1 million IOPS per volume with consistent latency down to 190 microseconds.

Lightbits, with certification on OCI, claims it enables organizations to run their most demanding, latency-sensitive workloads with sub-millisecond tail latencies, perfect for AI/ML, latency-sensitive databases, and real-time analytics workloads.

Kam Eshgi, Lightbits
Kam Eshgi

Kam Eshghi, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Lightbits, stated: “Certification on OCI marks a major step forward for Lightbits. We’re delivering a breakthrough in block storage performance, giving organizations the tools they need to migrate their most demanding applications to OCI and achieve faster, more reliable, and more efficient cloud services.”

OCI FIO benchmark runs, conducted with BM.DenseIO.E5.128 bare-metal OCI Compute shapes, supported by two BM.Standard.E5.192 shapes as clients, running Lightbits software on Oracle Linux 9.4, revealed:

  • 3 million 4K random read IOPS and 830K 4K random write IOPS per client with a replication factor of three, saturating the 100GbE network card configuration on BM.Standard.E5.192 servers.
  • Sub-300 microsecond latencies for both 4K random read and write operations, and 1ms latency when fully utilizing the clients for both random reads and writes – delivering fast performance even under heavy loads. 
  • In a mixed workload scenario (70 percent random reads, 30 percent random writes), each client achieved a combined 1.8 million IOPS, “setting a new benchmark for efficiency at scale.”

The Lightbits software on OCI can scale dynamically without downtime and has “seamless integration” with Kubernetes, OpenStack, and VMware environments. There is built-in high resiliency and availability, with snapshots, clones, and distributed management to prevent single points of failure.

Cameron Bahar, OCI
Cameron Bahar

Cameron Bahar, OCI SVP for Storage and Data Management, said: “Our collaboration with Lightbits and its certification on OCI delivers a modern approach to cloud storage with the performance and efficiency that enables our customers to bring their latency demanding enterprise workloads to OCI.”

Coincidentally, Lightbits competitor Volumez is also available in OCI, having been present in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace since September, claiming it provides 2.83 million IOPS, 135 microseconds ultra-low latency, and 16 GBps throughput per volume. It says users can harness Volumez’s SaaS services to create direct Linux-based data paths using a simple interface for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute VMs.

Find out more about Lightbits on OCI here and about OCI itself here.