Lightbits Labs says its block storage is supporting the expansion of Crusoe Energy Systems’ sustainable AI cloud service. Crusoe powers its datacenters with a combination of wasted, stranded, and clean energy resources to lower the cost and environmental impact of AI cloud computing.
“Stranded” energy is methane being flared or excess production from clean and renewable sources. Crusoe, which has dual headquarters in Denver and San Francisco, currently operates in seven countries with around 200 MW of total datacenter power capacity at its disposal, some owned by the company and some at shared datacenter sites.
In September, Crusoe said it was collaborating with VAST Data to offer its customers VAST’s Shared Disks technology, which is another high-performance storage product for AI workloads.
Lightbits uses NVMe/TCP to enable direct access to NVMe storage over standard Ethernet TCP/IP networks. This architecture is designed to significantly reduce latency and maximize throughput, making it ideal for demanding AI and ML workloads, according to Lightbits.
Lightbits scales IOPS with increased load while consistently maintaining latencies under 500 μs. The clustered architecture provides up to three replicas per volume across multiple availability zones for high availability.
“Lightbits’ 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, Crusoe chief product officer.
“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 to our customers to optimize their AI workflows.”
Users can resize their VMs and consume high-performance storage in the form of persistent disks on demand, while leveraging the OS images pipeline to generate their workload-specific images, such as LLM training with Jax or generative AI with Stable Diffusion. Lightbits’ technology is integrated with Kubernetes, OpenStack, and VMware to support modern cloud-native apps and traditional virtualized apps.
Kam Eshghi, Lightbits co-founder and chief strategy officer, added: “This expanded partnership reflects the tangible results Crusoe has seen and demonstrates our crucial role in shaping the future of AI cloud technology.”
Earlier this week, it was announced that Lightbits’ cloud virtual SAN software is now available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), following availability in the AWS and Azure clouds.
