Intel Corp. and Lightbits Labs today announced an agreement to propel development of disaggregated storage solutions to solve the challenges of today's data center operators who are craving improved total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) due to stranded disk capacity and performance. This strategic partnership includes technical co-engineering, go-to-market collaboration and an Intel Capital investment in Lightbits Labs. Lightbits' LightOS product delivers high-performance shared storage across servers while providing high availability and read-and-write management designed to maximize the value of flash-based storage. LightOS, while being fully optimized for Intel hardware, provides customers with vastly improved storage efficiency and reduces underutilization while maintaining compatibility with existing infrastructure without compromising performance and simplicity.

Lightbits Labs will enhance its composable disaggregated software-defined storage solution, LightOS, for Intel technologies, creating an optimized software and hardware solution. The system will utilize Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel 3D NAND SSDs based on Intel QLC Technology, Intel Xeon Scalable processors with unique built-in artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration capabilities and Intel® Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters with Application Device Queues (ADQ) technology. Intel's leadership FPGAs for next-generation performance, flexibility and programmability will complement the solution.

In addition to the technical collaboration between the two companies, Lightbits and Intel are collaborating to provide complete solutions to customers and develop the ecosystem to drive broad adoption of these innovations. As a first example of the potential performance benefit this collaboration offers, Lightbits Labs demonstrated LightOS NVMe over Fabrics TCP (NVMe-oF/TCP) storage with remote direct memory access (RDMA)-class performance when accelerated with the Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapter with ADQ technology. ADQ enables NVMe-oF/TCP to achieve distributed storage performance in the same range as RDMA-based protocols, while NVMe-oF/TCP enables broad adoption because of its ease of deployment and scalability. Results show an up to 30% improvement in response time predictability as measured by P99.99 tail latency, up to 50% reduction in average latency and up to 70% throughput increase as measured in IOPS when using ADQ vs. without ADQ. This integrated solution from Lightbits and Intel delivers persistent storage for cloud native applications with improved price-performance, ease-of-implementation, availability and scalability.

"Intel is an industry leader with deep expertise in data center technologies, cutting-edge products, global sales prowess and an impressive ecosystem," said Eran Kirzner, Lightbits Labs CEO and co-founder. "We are excited to partner with Intel Corporation, and our joint solutions will set the bar for generating new ROI metrics for enterprise and cloud customers."

Remi EL-Ouazzane, vice president and Data Platforms Group chief strategy and business development officer at Intel, said: "The data center is being transformed, with disaggregation and composability of resources being essential to meet the efficiency requirements needed to address the explosion of data. Our differentiated hardware capabilities coupled with Lightbits innovative NVMe over Fabrics software gives our joint customers an exceptional economic solution to address this strategic inflection point."

The Intel Capital investment in Lightbits will help to accelerate the company's development and go-to-market operations.