Intel Collaborates With Lightbits Labs

Intel Corp. announced that it has entered into a strategic collaboration with Lightbits Labs. This new collaboration is said to propel development of disaggregated storage solutions to solve the challenges of today’s data center operators who are craving improved total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) due to stranded disk capacity and performance. On top of the two companies sharing technology, Intel Capital will be investing in Lightbits Labs as well.

Intel Corp. announced that it has entered into a strategic collaboration with Lightbits Labs. This new collaboration is said to propel development of disaggregated storage solutions to solve the challenges of today’s data center operators who are craving improved total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) due to stranded disk capacity and performance. On top of the two companies sharing technology, Intel Capital will be investing in Lightbits Labs as well.

Lightbits Labs flagship product is LightOS, an NVMe/TCP clustered storage solution that as of the 2.0 update, enabled software-defined disaggregated storage for cloud data centers delivering direct-attached NVMe SSD performance and up to a 50% reduction in tail latency. The collaboration means that LightOS will be fully optimized for Intel’s hardware. This should translate into improved storage efficiency and reduced underutilization of hardware while at the same time remaining compatible with what is already in place. The collaboration will hit on all the big Intel hardware including Intel Optane persistent memory, Intel 3D NAND SSDs based on Intel QLC Technology, Intel Xeon Scalable processors with unique built-in artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration capabilities, and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters with Application Device Queues (ADQ) technology.

Aside from the technical and financial announced above, the two companies are working on complete solutions as well as developing the ecosystem to help garner adoption of the new innovations. The two companies have demonstrated a combined product with the LightOS NVMe over Fabrics TCP (NVMe-oF/TCP) storage with remote direct memory access (RDMA)-class performance when accelerated with the Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapter with ADQ technology. They claim a 30% improvement in response time predictability as measured by P99.99 tail latency, up to 50% reduction in average latency and up to 70% throughput increase as measured in IOPS when using ADQ vs. without ADQ. This is the first demonstration of a product that will deliver persistent storage for cloud native applications that will also show an improved price to performance ratio.

This is a new collaboration and there is no timetable as to when products will start rolling out. It will be interesting to see what the two come up with moving forward.

Intel

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