Lightbits was in stealth mode for nearly three years, building products and readying them to fundamentally change how companies can move to or enhance their hyperscale needs using off-the-shelf technologies and without having to rely on public clouds.
Getting attention for their unique approach in a noisy field of competing storage technologies involved promoting the company’s deeply experienced executive team, the company’s involvement as a leader in NVMe standards, its take on NVMe over fabrics, its reliance on flash storage, and its unique approach that separates storage and compute so each can scale separately.
Launch the company’s first two products – the LightOS software and the LightField storage acceleration card with a series of pre-announcement interviews with the industry’s most influential analysts and media, securing an analyst quote for the launch release. This was followed by an aggressive campaign of news dissemination in multiple languages, thought-leadership content pieces and more.
“ … as Google and other hyperscalers have taught us, the tail latency is what kills you in the long run in a distributed computing system, so instead of focusing on using extreme bandwidth and the absolute lowest latency – things that are required for modern HPC and AI clusters – Lightbits Labs went the other way and implemented its own TCP/IP stack such that it offers the kind of performance you would expect from high speed networks but with more predictable latencies that, when all is said and done, give flash in network-attached storage servers that are remote from server nodes performance that is indistinguishable from directly attached flash storage inside of a server node. This breaks flash free from the server, allowing for compute and storage to be scaled independently and on the scale of a datacenter, not just a rack or a row of iron.” – Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Next Platform: “NVM-Express Storage Goes Mainstream over Ethernet Fabrics,” March 12, 2019