Sales growth was fueled in part by the company’s strong partnerships, to which Intel was added in late September and also included new funding from Intel Capital. The partnership is designed to propel development of disaggregated storage solutions to solve the challenges of today’s data center operators who are craving improved storage efficiency and capacity utilization while maintaining compatibility with existing infrastructure without compromising performance and simplicity. This strategic partnership includes technical co-engineering, go-to-market collaboration, as well as the financial investment.
“In so many ways and for so many people 2020 was a very difficult year. Lightbits is fortunate that we were able to keep our employees safe through remote work, while also achieving and exceeding our goals for the year – including growing our customer base, enhancing our products, and expanding our partnerships and investors,” said Eran Kerzner, CEO. “We fully anticipate a strong surge in our sales throughout 2021.”
Last year, Lightbits announced significant product advancements, introducing LightOS™ 2.0 in June enabling full cloud-native persistent storage with high availability. The technological innovation solidified the company's position as a leader in scalable and efficient cloud-native storage that’s easy to consume for customers' private, hybrid, and edge cloud deployments. In December, the company released LightOS™ 2.1 that further enhances high-performance, scalability, and low latency so Lightbits’ customers can unleash hyperscale storage, but at a fraction of the cost of even the most advanced cloud storage offerings. As an example, Lightbits’ LightOS outperforms even the latest Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes with 5 times lower latency (200µs), 6 times the IOPS per volume (1.5M), twice the throughput per volume (8GB/s), 4 times larger volume size (256TB), and has features such as resizable volumes and multi-attach that are still roadmap items for io2 Block Express.
Through these advancements, Lightbits expanded the use cases for its patented solutions, including NVMe as a Service, as part of the IaaS umbrella. For financial services, use cases expanded to include database acceleration and Monte Carlo simulation. And under the SaaS umbrella, Lightbits LightOS gained traction as a high-performance replacement for Ceph.
In addition, Lightbits applied for five new patents that were accepted by the U.S. Patent Office, bringing the number of patents held by Lightbits to 20. The newly minted patents improve key functions within the NVMe/TCP storage architecture and help Lightbits protect its innovative approach to improving storage capacity utilization, reducing latency, and improving garbage collection features.
“With its blend of performance and high availability based around industry standards, NVMe/TCP offers a compelling value proposition for those needing extremely high performance in the composable block storage market,” said Eric Burgener, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC Research. “Lightbits Labs has significantly contributed to the NVMe/TCP standard and is continuing to improve upon the standard with its latest IP.”
Details on the new and existing Lightbits Labs patents can be found in the links below:
- 10,713,162: System and method for computer data peer to peer data transfers
- 10,684,964: System and method for reducing read latency in storage devices
- 10,642,733: System and method for memory interface load balancing
- 10,628,301: System and method for optimizing write amplification of non-volatile memory storage media
- 10,552,349: System and method for dynamic pipelining of direct memory access (DMA) transactions
Among the milestones, 2020 drove several notable industry recognitions including:
- Lightbits named to Storage 100 among 40 Coolest Software Defined Storage Vendors
- Lightbits listed as Top 10 Hottest Storage Startups
- Lightbits Wins 2020 4th China-Israel Innovation and Entrepreneurship Contest
- Lightbits Named Red Herring Top 100 Company Europe
- Lightbits Shortlisted as Most Promising Startup and Best Hybrid Cloud Solution
- Lightbits secures Bronze Stevie Award as Tech Startup of the Year-Software
Additional Resources:
- IDC Research: NVMe/TCP Enables the Democratization of Disaggregated NVMe-based Storage
- Lightbits Labs Hyperscale Storage for All Video
- LightOS 2.0 Product Overview: Software-Defined Composable Storage
- What New in LightOS 2.0? (blog)
- Kubernetes and LightOS: Performance, Persistence, Simplicity
- Apache Kafka and LightOS
About Lightbits Labs™
Lightbits Labs’ mission is to lead the cloud-native data center transformation by delivering scalable and efficient software defined storage that is easy to consume. Founded in 2016, Lightbits brings the agility of hyperscale storage to private clouds and edge clouds. The company pioneered NVMe/TCP so the solution is easy to deploy at scale, while delivering performance that is similar to local flash. Lightbits Labs is backed by strategic investors including Cisco Investments, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, and Micron, as well as top investors and VCs including Avigdor Willenz, Lip-Bu Tan, Marius Nacht, SquarePeg Capital, and WRVI Capital.
Visit www.lightbitslabs.com or contact us at info@lightbitslabs.com.