In this episode, Chris chats with Abel Gordon, Chief System Architect at Lightbits Labs, discussing the challenges and benefits of building a virtual storage area network (SAN) on public cloud infrastructure. Lightbits originally developed the NVMe/TCP protocol and uses this feature to build virtual SANs using public cloud instances. This is a topic we first looked at in episode #210, so it’s good to get a practitioner’s experience.

Modern public cloud now features fast networking, low-latency NVMe and high-performance virtual and physical instances. Unfortunately, NVMe devices are ephemeral and any provisioned storage in the cloud is charged at full capacity. For users of on-premises SANs, the lack of thin provisioning may be an unwelcome surprise.

Why build a virtual SAN, other than to save storage costs? There’s a lot more involved, including delivering resiliency, scalability, targeted performance and capacity. Abel discusses the benefits, then goes on to enumerate the challenges involved when building on vendor-owned infrastructure. Finally, the discussion moves on to how Lightbits’ software is deployed and operated, including the managed application capability in Microsoft Azure.

For more information on Lightbits Labs, visit the company website at https://www.lightbitslabs.com/

As Abel, suggests you can contact him on LinkedIn or email him directly at [email protected].

Elapsed Time: 00:51:15

Copyright (c) 2016-2023 Unpacked Network. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #cv54.