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Virtual SAN provider Lightbits has an intelligent control plane to manage clusters of its block storage software instances federated together for 100 PB-plus deployments of Kubernetes, KubeVirt, OpenShift, and OpenStack.
Lightbits block storage runs on-premises or as ephemeral instances in the AWS, Azure, and Oracle clouds. The software-defined storage provides a linearly scalable virtual SAN by clustering virtual machines, using NVMe over TCP, and can deliver up to 1 million IOPS/volume with consistent 190 microseconds latency. The company is finding that customers want larger-scale deployments.
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A tech preview of cluster federation was announced on December 4 in the Lightbits v3.17.1 release, enabling organizations running its storage for Kubernetes, OpenStack, and large-scale virtualization to continue expanding without redesigning their infrastructure. At the time, Lightbits said it was developing a major capability in which clusters would no longer operate as standalone systems. They would be coordinated by an intelligent cluster manager (ICM) across a federated deployment. ICM has a policy-driven, fleet-scale architecture.
Lightbits marketing head Robert Terlizzi said: “As organizations scale, the challenge isn’t just maintaining performance – it’s maintaining consistency and efficiency across dozens or even hundreds of environments.”
“ICM becomes the air traffic controller for your data platform. It unifies and simplifies storage management without ever impacting the direct NVMe over TCP data path, ensuring customers get fast performance with dramatically reduced operational overhead.”
It is a multi-cluster management and provisioning broker, receiving requests from Kubernetes CSI plugins, hypervisors, and OpenStack Cinder drivers, and intelligently directing them across the entire storage fleet. ICM has intelligent placement logic, and ensures storage objects are created on the optimal cluster, based on real-time capacity, policy, and operational state. For example, it receives provisioning requests, evaluates the real-time status of all participating clusters, and places volumes where capacity and health are optimal.
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ICM features automated capacity balancing and automated storage lifecycle tasks across a cluster fleet. Operators can freeze clusters or disable new provisioning to support maintenance, upgrades, and decommissioning without disruption.
The ICM facility is immediately available for tech preview in Lightbits software v3.17.1. Read an ICM background paper here.
