Lightbits Introduces SuperSSD

Today Lightbits Labs rolled out what it is calling the world’s first ultra-high capacity, higher performance SSD storage appliance, the SuperSSD. The company goes on to that the appliance is the industry’s first scalable, Ethernet-attached SSD solution that specifically addresses the data-storage speed, capacity and reliability needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) training systems.

Today Lightbits Labs rolled out what it is calling the world’s first ultra-high capacity, higher performance SSD storage appliance, the SuperSSD. The company goes on to that the appliance is the industry’s first scalable, Ethernet-attached SSD solution that specifically addresses the data-storage speed, capacity and reliability needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) training systems.

Founded in 2016 by Avigdor Willenz, Eran Kirzner, and Muli Ben-Yehuda, Lightbits Labs has taken on the bold mission of reinventing the way storage and networking are conducted in cloud data centers. The company must be on to something as they have some fairly large investors including Dell Technologies Capital, Cisco Investments, Micron, SquarePeg Capital and Walden International, and with investments from Avigdor Willenz (Lightbits Chairman and Founder) and Lip-Bu Tan (CEO of Cadence Design Systems and Chairman at Walden International). 

An issue that Lightbits Labs sees is the need for fast and massive parallel access to data and an appliance that can support the scale, performance, and high-availability needs of organizations that are undergoing digital transformations. A good example of this and another wrinkle in transforming is the broadening adoption of AI and ML that have leveraged DAS, but their data sets have scaled massively. SuperSSD addresses these issues by virtualizing and managing a large pool of NVMe SSDs with a global flash translation layer (GFTL). The company states that it can ensure efficient storage utilization and wire-speed access to very large data sets. And best of all, SuperSSD can be seamlessly installed on existing network and compute infrastructures. 

Benefits include:

• High Capacity: Scalable from 64TB to 1PB usable capacity (field upgradeable) that can be shared across multiple compute nodes.
• High Performance: Supporting up to 5 million 4K input/output operations per second (IOPs) and with a latency consistency of less than 200us with end-to-end NVMe
• Connectivity: Dual 100GbE wire-speed performance
• Compression: 4X data reduction or greater at line rate, increasing usable storage capacity while enhancing SSD endurance and accelerating write-intensive applications.
• Fault tolerant: Elastic Erasure Coding (EC) isolates SSD failures, ensuring data protection and no service interruption.
• Offload Application Server: Fully offload all the storage tasks from the application server.
• Computational Storage: Provide in-storage processing so that user-defined functions can run in the storage server to maximize storage bandwidth and improve application performance.
• NVMe/TCP Simplicity: Uses standard TCP/IP network infrastructure for immediate shared storage supporting many applications and compute nodes.
• Form Factor: 2U Standard Rack Server with simple plug-and-play installation

Availability 

The Lightbits Labs SuperSSD appliance is available for purchase now.

Lightbits Labs

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