Significantly Simplifying Fleet-Scale Storage Operations
Lightbits Labs (Lightbits®), inventor of the NVMe® over TCP storage protocol, today announced Intelligent Cluster Management (ICM), a new service in technical preview that elevates Lightbits’ software-defined block storage to a unified, fleet-wide data platform. ICM provides a centralized control plane that automates and optimizes storage operations across multiple Lightbits clusters — delivering the efficiency and scale that modern cloud-native and virtualized environments demand.
ICM serves as 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. With its Intelligent Placement Logic, ICM ensures storage objects are created on the optimal cluster based on real-time capacity, policy, and operational state. This evolution removes the practical limitations of single-cluster management and is designed to support large-scale (>100PB) high-performance block storage deployments of K8s, KubeVirt, OpenShift, and OpenStack.
“As organizations scale, the challenge isn’t just maintaining performance—it’s maintaining consistency and efficiency across dozens or even hundreds of environments,” said Robert Terlizzi, Head of Product Marketing at Lightbits Labs. “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.”
Key Benefits of ICM:
- Seamless Fleet-Scale Operations: A single operational framework that manages and automates lifecycle tasks across large, diverse cluster fleets.
- Automated Capacity Balancing: Default policies automatically place new workloads on the clusters with the most available space—eliminating skewed deployments and resource constraints.
- Operational Control and Flexibility: Operators can freeze clusters or disable new provisioning to support maintenance, upgrades, and decommissioning without disruption.
Lightbits’ new ICM service transforms independent clusters into a coordinated, intelligently managed fleet—simplifying scale, improving efficiency, and preventing the operational bottlenecks common in large, distributed environments. It offers seamless integration and backward compatibility with earlier Lightbits software versions, hybrid clusters, and Lightbits utilities such as Data Mobility Service and Photon.
Availability
ICM is immediately available for tech preview in Lightbits software v3.17.1. Book a demo or request a technical deep dive today.
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