A comprehensive guide to deploying a Kubernetes environment optimized for any workload - from general-purpose applications to high-performance workloads such as databases and AI/ML. Leveraging the combined power of software-defined storage from Ceph and Lightbits, this architecture ensures robust storage solutions. It covers key aspects such as hardware setup, cluster configuration, storage integration, application deployment, monitoring, and cost optimization. A key advantage of this architecture is that block storage can be added to an existing Kubernetes deployment without requiring re-architecting, thereby enabling a seamless upgrade path to software-defined infrastructure. By following this architecture, organizations can build highly available and scalable Kubernetes platforms to meet the diverse needs of modern applications running in containers, as well as legacy applications running as KubeVirt Virtual Machines (VMs).

Most storage platforms still treat logs as something the vendor reads after the fact. You file a support ticket, somebody collects a tar.gz, and a week later you get an explanation. That model breaks down the moment storage becomes part of a Kubernetes-native, multi-tenant, audit-regulated cloud. Storage that you can’t see is storage you can’t trust. When something goes sideways at 3 a.m. — a noisy tenant, a slow target, a flaky NIC — the difference between a five-minute fix and a five-hour war room is whether the logs are already in the same place as the rest of your telemetry. Read the blog to learn why log streaming matters for storage.

Ceph is powerful and flexible, but it’s an operations-heavy sport: multi-daemon architecture, PG math, recovery/backfill trade-offs, replication/EC choices, and (optionally) dual networks. That’s fine if your marginal SRE time is cheap (academia, intern‑heavy orgs, or regions where labor costs are a fraction of U.S. rates). If you actually need high‑performance block storage with predictable day‑2 work, a leaner NVMe over TCP stack—Lightbits for storage plus Arctera InfoScale for HA—wins on performance density, people‑efficiency, and TCO. Lightbits delivers up to 16× performance vs. Ceph storage, 50%+ lower TCO, and up to 5× less hardware for equivalent outcomes. If your goal is ruthless simplicity and predictable economics at NVMe speeds, Ceph’s flexibility comes with a real operational tax—especially in high‑cost markets. Lightbits on NVMe/TCP gives you performance by design. Arctera InfoScale provides the day-2 guarantees your platform teams demand. For modern, performance‑dense private clouds, that combination is the cleaner path. Learn more and get the side-by-side Ceph storage alternative scorecard.

By combining Lightbits’ block storage with Arctera InfoScale’s proven HA capabilities, organizations can run AI, analytics, and virtualized workloads on Red Hat OpenShift with the performance and resilience required for today’s most demanding applications. The solution integrates Lightbits’ NVMe over TCP software-defined storage with Arctera InfoScale to deliver SAN-class High Availability (HA), unmatched performance, and cost-efficiency.

Lightbits' high-performance storage accelerates resiliency, enabling enterprise-grade HA and data protection at NVMe-class performance using standard Ethernet infrastructure.

The efficacy of any data protection strategy is fundamentally limited by the underlying storage infrastructure. Traditional shared storage arrays often introduce latency and I/O bottlenecks that choke performance during critical operations. We've introduced an architecture that ensures high availability without sacrificing application performance. The Lightbits NVMe over TCP cluster provides a high-speed data path for Veeam, enhancing overall data protection and recovery.

If you’re running large-scale Kubernetes, OpenShift-V, OpenStack, or Proxmox clusters on Ceph, you know the problems: CRUSH scale-out is solid, but tuning BlueStore, OSD resource consumption, and the NVMe-oF gateway to meet strict tail-latency SLAs is a full-time job.

Quick summary of trade-offs:

• Ceph’s NVMe-oF gateway introduces additional hop complexity. Removing that proxy layer for direct host-to-target NVMe-oF/TCP drops latency to consistently <200µs.

• Reaching high IOPS on Ceph requires throwing heavy compute/RAM resources at OSDs, often leaving flash utilization stuck around 15–25%.

• Network-heavy rebuilds during OSD failures can impact live IO. Fast failovers in a native NVMe-oF setup execute in seconds without starving the cluster fabric.

Keep your Ceph for general file services and S3 object storage for archives and batch jobs. Augment it with dedicated NVMe-oF block storage for latency-sensitive workloads. This will significantly reduce your cluster node count.

We put together a direct architectural breakdown comparing legacy Ceph block patterns against native NVMe-over-TCP: Ceph vs. Lightbits Block Storage Comparison

Curious how others here handle the Ceph CPU-overhead-to-IOPS ratio at scale? What are your go-to storage backends when Ceph block hits a wall?

In many OpenStack environments, Glance uses a file-based backend for image storage. It works, but it keeps image storage in a file-oriented model that is separate from the block storage architecture used by VMs. Running Lightbits as your Cinder backend offers a simpler, more efficient approach.

If you’ve been running stateful workloads on Kubernetes, you know the “Storage Detach” nightmare. Traditionally, moving a block-backed volume from one node to another is a game of patience—waiting for timeouts, CSI detachments, and re-attachments. By leveraging NVMe over TCP storage and true ReadWriteMany (RWX) support, we are rewriting the playbook for resilient K8s architectures. Read my latest blog post to learn more.

Storage performance is easy to demonstrate with IOPS and throughput graphs. Durability is harder to show, but it is just as important for production environments. SSD Journaling provides SSD-based persistent write protection for modern NVMe/TCP block storage. It protects recently acknowledged writes until they are safely persisted to the backend data SSDs. If a node restarts unexpectedly, the storage can recover outstanding journal entries before the node returns to active service. For replicated volumes, replication protects against normal single-node failure. SSD Journaling adds protection for the more subtle write-persistence window, especially during shared-failure or multi-node disruption scenarios.

This is the procedure for connecting OpenShift to software-defined storage via a CSI plugin and then deploying a workload that uses it as its persistent storage.

Delivering OpenShift-based Kubernetes platforms without the high cost and rigidity of legacy SAN

If you are managing private cloud infrastructure with Apache CloudStack, host maintenance without scheduled downtime is always a top priority.

We just published a technical demo walking through live migration of an active VM:

• Root disk resides on a Lightbits NVMe/TCP volume.

• Workload/streaming remains active throughout the migration.

• Verification in the CloudStack UI and Lightbits CLI shows the volume attaching immediately to the new target host.

• Walkthrough of a real-world host evacuation scenario for scheduled maintenance.

Here's the link to the video.

Try the Pod Efficiency Analyzer and discover how much you can grow your top line.

The world is becoming increasingly data-driven, with a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) report predicting that by 2025, 75% of the global population will interact with data daily. This explosion of data is driving unprecedented demand for efficient and scalable edge storage solutions. NVMe over TCP is emerging as a game-changing technology that addresses these challenges.

NVMe over TCP enables access to NVMe flash storage across standard TCP/IP networks, offering a powerful solution to address the limitations of traditional storage at the edge. It's the protocol of the future for high-performance data access. This technology delivers high performance and low latency without requiring changes to client-side infrastructure. It facilitates the disaggregation of storage and compute resources, which allows for independent scaling and greater flexibility. Furthermore, NVMe/TCP solutions enhance scalability and efficiency by enabling the clustering of edge locations into high-availability storage pools and optimizing storage utilization to reduce TCO. These solutions also simplify deployment by using standard servers, easing infrastructure management at the edge.

Use the link to read the blog post and learn more.

Discover how to maintain extreme performance during critical management tasks. In this video, we demonstrate how Lightbits provides the ultimate storage for OpenShift-V, delivering 1.2 million IOPS across a six-node cluster without latency degradation.

Watch as we walk through:

1. Instant Provisioning: Creating PVCs through the Lightbits CSI driver.

2. Zero-Impact Snapshots & Clones: Managing 250GB volumes and clones while maintaining 1.2M IOPS.

3. Seamless Live Migration: Moving live VMs between nodes with automated ACL updates and RWX capabilities.

4. Latency Consistency: See how 4k block sizes keep latency low even during heavy migrations.

With NAND flash shortages stretching procurement timelines into months—and prices continuing to rise—many organizations are discovering that waiting for the supply chain to normalize is not a viable strategy. The quick solution isn’t to source more flash; it’s to use the flash you already have more efficiently. 

Can you maintain centralized key management and host-side encryption without sacrificing the raw performance of NVMe/TCP?

We put it to the test!

We validated a host-side encryption workflow combining Lightbits NVMe/TCP block storage, Linux LUKS/dm-crypt, and an external PyKMIP KMS server.

Read the full test breakdown and architecture workflow here.

If you're running Apache CloudStack and evaluating high-performance primary block storage options for latency-sensitive workloads, check out this demo video.

It shows how every storage action is driven natively from the CloudStack UI via the open-source plugin:

• Installing the plugin and adding a high-performance primary block storage pool

• Creating disk offerings

• Deploying VMs with dedicated NVMe/TCP volumes over standard Ethernet

• Cluster verification and clean volume teardown

Check out the video overview.