NVMe/TCP pioneer developed initial specification and showcased industry’s
first hyperscale NVMe/TCP storage platform at recent UNH-IOL NVMe Plugfest #10

SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 03, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With NVM Express’ recent ratification of TCP/IP as an approved transport layer for nonvolatile memory express (NVMe), Lightbits Labs announced that its hyperscale storage platform is the industry’s first to take full advantage of the newly minted transport standard. As the storage industry’s pioneer in NVMe/TCP, Lightbits helped drive the standardization effort and worked closely with NVM Express and its member companies, including taking a leadership role in the initial development of the standard specifications. Designed to layer over existing software-based TCP transport implementations as well as future hardware accelerated implementations, NVMe/TCP lets large-scale data centers utilize their existing, ubiquitous TCP/IP infrastructure to realize NVMe’s performance benefits. 

Cloud service providers and enterprises with webscale infrastructures are turning to NVMe to meet the storage demands of data-intensive workloads. As designers make NVMe their preferred solution for high-speed storage, the NVMe market is forecast to grow to $60 billion by 2021 (G2M Research), and that will only increase with the ratification of the NVMe/TCP protocol. The transport enables storage access between servers interconnected by any standard TCP/IP network with excellent performance and latency characteristics.

“Using NVMe/TCP, Lightbits Labs has pioneered an approach that separates storage and compute without touching the network infrastructure or data center clients,” said Eran Kirzner, co-founder and CEO of Lightbits Labs. “Our industry-first hyperscale NVMe/TCP storage solution is purpose-built for the cloud and leverages today’s data center infrastructure, allowing IT organizations to smoothly transition to a low-latency, shared storage model without sacrificing performance.”

Lightbits also announced that it participated in the NVMe over Fabrics™ (NVMe-oF) Plugfest at The University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), the compliance certification lab for NVMe technology. Held on November 12-15, 2018, in Durham, New Hampshire, the PlugFest brought together leading vendors to test against NVMe standards. As the only NVMe/TCP storage solution vendor at this event, Lightbits successfully showcased interoperability with multiple NIC vendors and demonstrated NVMe/TCP’s ease of deployment.

“Lightbits has been leading the charge towards standardization and adoption of NVMe/TCP, bringing much-needed ubiquity to the NVMe over Fabrics ecosystem,” said Peter Onufryk, NVM Express board member. “Although new standards and protocols often take years to mature and gain adoption, I expect to see NVMe/TCP adoption to be faster than any previous storage protocol.”

Lightbits’ platform is the first solution in the industry to deliver the benefits of NVMe/TCP including:

• Providing comparable performance and latency to direct attached SSDs
• 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 clients
• 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

NVM Express is a consortium of more than 100 companies advocating for non-volatile memory in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center. The NVMe/TCP Transport Binding specification was ratified on November 15, 2018, and is now officially part of NVM Express’ NVMe-oF family of transports.

NVMe/TCP extends the NVMe-oF offering for existing data centers that already include a TCP/IP infrastructure. For more details about this technology and Lightbits’ storage platform, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q3saA3qhW0

For more information about NVMe/TCP, see the NVMe/TCP Transport Binding specification at: https://nvmexpress.org/welcome-nvme-tcp-to-the-nvme-of-family-of-transports/.

About Lightbits Labs
Lightbits Labs was purpose-built for cloud infrastructure. It was founded with the belief that hyperscale data centers require disaggregation of storage and compute, and by separating the two, Lightbits’ solution allows storage and compute to scale independently. Based in Israel and Silicon Valley, Lightbits’ team led the development of the NVMe/TCP standard and includes key contributors to the NVMe and NVMe-oF protocols. Find out more at www.lightbitslabs.com.