SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lightbits Labs announced today that it will exhibit and demo one of the first hyperscale storage platforms for NVM Express™ (NVMe™) over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) at the Flash Memory Summit, to be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, August 7-9, 2018. The company has also published a white paper that outlines the benefits of NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) for data centers. It is available for download at www.lightbitslabs.com.
NVMe has transformed the storage industry since its emergence as the state-of-the-art protocol for high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs). Initially designed for high-performance direct-attached PCIe SSDs, NVMe was later expanded with NVMe over Fabrics™ (NVMe-oF™) to support a rack-scale remote pool of SSDs. The IT industry has widely accepted that this new NVMe-oF model will replace the iSCSI protocol as the communication standard between compute servers and storage servers and become the default protocol for disaggregated storage.
The initial definition of NVMe-oF included support for two transport layers: Fibre Channel (FC) and remote direct memory access (RDMA) fabrics. NVMe/TCP extends the NVMe-oF offering for existing data centers that already include a TCP/IP infrastructure, offering the following benefits:
- Providing comparable performance and latency to Direct Attached SSDs (DAS)
- 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 application servers
- 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
- A standard-based solution that will have industry-wide support
Lightbits is working with industry leaders within NVM Express, Inc. to extend the NVMe-oF standard to support TCP/IP transport. The 1.1 revision of NVMe over Fabrics, targeted for release by end of this year, includes the TCP/IP transport layer as one of its marquee features.
“As data centers move from direct-attached SSDs to disaggregated storage architectures, it is important to minimize disruption in implementation,” said Eran Kirzner, founder and CEO of Lightbits Labs. “Built with NVMe/TCP technology as the backbone, Lightbits’ solution offers estimated savings and performance advantages that include reduced tail latency by up to 50% versus direct attached storage and a doubling of SSD capacity utilization. We’re excited to demonstrate Lightbits’ capabilities to attendees at the Flash Memory Summit.”
"The NVM Express organization is pleased to add TCP/IP as a supported transport for NVMe over Fabrics," said Amber Huffman, president, NVM Express, Inc. "Lightbits' solution demonstrates a key benefit of NVMe/TCP, enabling the use of NVMe-oF in existing data centers without requiring changes to the network infrastructure and with great performance."
At the Flash Memory Summit, Lightbits’ executives will present at the following panels:
- Chief Technology Officer Session, NVMF-301-1: Exploring NVMe-oF Thursday, 8:30–10:50 AM Muli Ben-Yehuda, CTO at Lightbits Labs, will be part of the CTO Forum and will present on NVMe/TCP as the best way to disaggregate flash storage.
- Session NVMF-302-1: NVMe-oF Use Cases Thursday, 2:10-5:00 PM Principal architect Sagi Grimberg will share the latest developments toward achieving high performance and low latency with NVMe over TCP/IP.
Lightbits will also showcase its NVMe/TCP storage platform at Intel’s booth (#745) at the conference, and team members will be on hand for demonstrations.
About Lightbits Labs Lightbits Labs was purpose-built for cloud infrastructure. Its technology separates compute and storage and allows them to scale independently. Lightbits’ team includes key contributors to the NVMe standard and some of the originators of NVMe over Fabric. Lightbits Labs leads the crafting of the NVMe/TCP standard. Find out more at www.lightbitslabs.com .
