Solution featuring Intel’s Mount Evans IPU helps maximize storage revenue for CSPs and Private Clouds
Intel ON – Lightbits Labs (Lightbits), a leader in NVMe-based, scalable and software-defined elastic block storage for private and edge clouds, will be conducting a joint product demonstration with Intel at the upcoming Intel Innovation event, part of the Intel ON Event Series, taking place October 27-28, 2021. The demonstration will showcase Lightbits LightOS® providing remote storage services to storage-less servers equipped with Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), providing Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) with a disaggregated storage solution for IPU-enabled hosts.
IPU-based infrastructure enables CSPs and Enterprise Private Clouds to maximize data center revenue by moving infrastructure tasks from CPUs to IPUs. This frees up server CPU cycles which would have ordinarily been used for infrastructure tasks that do not generate revenue for the CSP. By moving these tasks to the IPU, CSPs can monetize 100% of their server CPUs, plus improve application performance of customers’ essential workloads and enhance data security.
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“The combination of Lightbits LightOS and Intel’s Mount Evans IPU equips CSPs and organizations with private clouds to extend NVMe capabilities across the entire data center and the intelligent edge using simple and efficient TCP/IP networks and without host CPU involvement. By populating storage servers running Lightbits LightOS with the NVMe® SSDs of their choice and equipping application servers with Intel’s IPUs, any application server on the network can enjoy local NVMe performance with unlimited remote NVMe storage,” said Muli Ben-Yehuda, Chief Scientist at Lightbits. “IPUs will do for everyone what Annapurna cloud computing infrastructure did for AWS (Amazon Web Services), for instance, offload storage, networking, acceleration, and security out of host CPUs and free those CPU cycles for customers. Lightbits can deliver offloaded storage access across a broad ecosystem of storage environments. This demonstration at Intel Innovation is evidence of the strong engineering collaboration between Intel and Lightbits delivering value to CSPs.”
When managing a server farm with a local storage architecture, over-provisioning local storage based on unpredictable tenant demands is a common and costly practice. These inefficiencies can be overcome with a high-performance clustered storage solution such as Lightbits LightOS software with Intel technologies. Lightbits LightOS is a simple, scalable, software-defined block storage solution that is deployed on commodity servers over standard TCP/IP networks and requires zero modification to applications. When paired with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators, Intel Optane persistent memory (PMem), and 100Gb Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters, it offers the ultimate in performance, hardware-enhanced security, resilience, and scalability for bare metal, virtualized, and containerized environments while lowering cost.
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“This demonstration shows Intel’s Mount Evans IPU running the NVMe over TCP initiator software talking over the network to a Lightbits storage target. By offloading the remote storage access to the IPU, we increase security and performance while freeing up valuable Intel Xeon Scalable processor cycles and providing a true bare-metal disaggregated storage solution. This combination enables private-cloud infrastructures to realize some of the same performance and scale advantages of large-scale clouds. We also demonstrate how, by utilizing the Lightbits CSI plug-in on the Mount Evans IPU, you can bring the Lightbits software-defined storage solutions to your Kubernetes based infrastructure,” said Brad Burres, Intel Fellow in the Network and Edge Group, and Chief Architect of the Ethernet Product Group at Intel.
The demonstration will showcase Intel’s Mount Evans IPU, providing efficient and seamless remote storage to storage-less IPU-equipped application servers running Cassandra in a Kubernetes (k8s) environment, with the storage provided by Lightbits. The environment will consist of an Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based application server configured with a Mount Evans IPU that is paired with a Lightbits LightOS NVMe/TCP storage cluster over a 100GbE network. Each server running Lightbits LightOS will be configured with two Intel Xeon Scalable processors, 2TB of Intel Optane persistent memory, 256TB of Intel SSD QLC, and two 100 GbE Intel Ethernet Network Adapters E810. The Lightbits software enables the configuring of the ¾ PB of QLC SSD storage into logical NVMe namespaces that the Mount Evans IPU will access using NVMe/TCP while providing emulated local NVMe devices to the application server. The demonstration will highlight how the Mount Evans IPU and Lightbits software are used to provide configurable Kubernetes storage volumes to containerized host applications, including in particular the Cassandra NoSQL database.
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